BioShock, Borderlands and XCOM 2 on Switch are too big to fit on a cartridge

Nintendo Switch owners got some brilliant news in late March, with a new Nintendo Direct revealing that a series of classic video games were getting ported to the handheld-home console hybrid.

That’s right: the BioShock Collection, Borderlands Legendary Collection, and XCOM 2 Collection are all coming to Nintendo Switch.

Some of these games were pretty big releases on PC and consoles, but we wouldn’t be surprised at this point to see them on Switch. With Doom and Doom Eternal landing on the Switch platform, and even The Witcher 3 getting ported to the console, it’s clear that the humble Switch is good for a lot more than paying rent to Tom Nook in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

However, there’s one catch to these releases, which is their install file sizes.

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Make room, everyone

The Borderlands Collection – which does contain the first two games and 2014’s Pre-Sequel, though not Borderlands 3 – requires an additional 6.6GB download on top of the data contained on the cartridge to load just the first game. If you want to play Borderlands 2 or the Pre-Sequel, you’ll need an additional 35GB download as well.

The XCOM 2 Collection cartridge also contains a fraction of the total game – only 8GB – and may require up to 24GB additional downloads.

We don’t have an exact figure for the BioShock Collection, but the small print tells us that "later game contents and add-ons will need to be downloaded" too.

While the inclusion of these AAA games on the Switch is to be welcomed, we’re getting to a point where physical game cartridges simply can’t cope with the amount of data needed to load up modern titles. 

Right now, buying these games on cartridge amounts to little more than bulky redeem code, and will still require you to use up most if not all of the Switch’s 32GB internal storage.

There are, thankfully, plenty of good micro SD cards for Nintendo Switch worth considering, which can expand your storage capacity several times over – and we’ve listed some TechRadar-approved options listed below – but it really does defeat the point of a physical release.

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Via NintendoLife