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The story
An article published on Toyo Keizai Online, which attributes the poor sales of PS5 and Switch 2 games to “insufficient console storage,” was picked up on 5ch’s game hardware board. The article argued that backward-compatible games eat up console storage and discourage purchases of new titles, while also pointing out a contradiction in Nintendo’s explanation that “unwanted games can simply be deleted.” In response, thread posters pushed back one after another, arguing the article’s premise has no basis — noting that the original Switch, which had only 32GB of storage, still sold software just fine. The discussion also branched into the difference between Switch 2’s pricey proprietary microSD Express cards and the old, cheap SD cards, plus a nitpicky argument over the “publisher” credit on certain Nintendo titles.
On the matter of software sales trends: this is what the author calls the “storage cost” problem — the worry that if backward compatibility is kept, previous-generation games keep hogging console storage, which in turn saps the motivation to buy new titles. Nintendo explains that “unwanted games can be deleted, and save data (data storing game progress and player records) stays in the cloud, etc.,” but from the user’s perspective, that’s a major contradiction.
Source: finance.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Sony, not thinking about user psychology at all!!
Calling it 'deepening' is dumb.
The only real solution to more capacity is charging more money.
What's with the "I don't think" it matches user psychology?
You got any actual numbers to back that up?
PS6 will probably let you keep using whatever M.2 SSD you expanded your PS5 with too.
External hard drives are only good for archiving.
You still have to install onto the PS5's internal storage anyway, so it doesn't help much.
It's not just for storing PS5 games — you can play your PS4 backward-compatible games normally too. What are you even talking about?
Sounds like you don't even own a PS5.
Stuffing a game full of data until it hits 300GB like an idiot is what developers with no real skill do.
Even Nintendo's own "just a Switch 2 edition" games are topping 40GB now, though.
and that completely freed me from any storage stress.
The external drive is just for keeping PS4 titles on.
For a handheld like the Switch 2, throwing money at it barely makes a dent, but PS5 is a different story.
Sounds like a very 'Yasuda who never actually plays games' kind of article. (Yasuda being the article's author.)
What are you even going to put in 5TB?
Toddler games like that ¥50-billion Wolverine?
Sony's Wolverine rated 'the most brain-dead toddler game in history'
https://krsw.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/ghard/1789165514/
the Switch, with only 32GB of storage, sold its games just fine.
Switch's launch titles blew past 32GB right out of the gate and didn't even fit on the internal storage.
So many idiots trash-talk Switch 2's storage without knowing that.
Starting next generation it'll all be cloud gaming anyway,
so the performance, storage, and memory problems solve themselves.
You're never allowed to talk about graphics quality or frame rate again after that.
Nintendo's own core titles don't use key cards at all.
And obviously, if you're comparing digital versions, the conditions are identical from the start.
What matters more is the 8x storage advantage (still 4x even against the OLED model).
What about storage that can't even fit FF7 Rebirth and Revelations at the same time?
There were tons of examples like that on the Switch too.
Some games were over 32GB right out of the gate — you needed a microSD expansion for even one game, let alone two.
Even if you buy the physical package on Switch 2, though…
Back in the Switch days there wasn't a name like 'key card,' but games running on the same principle existed — ones over 16GB that didn't fit on the game card and forced you to download the rest.
Naturally that ate into console storage too.
Both have garbage storage, so what exactly is your point? On top of that, the SD card you used on Switch doesn't even work on Switch 2.
The Switch had storage problems just as bad as Switch 2, if not worse, and its games still sold fine — so Yasuda's argument that low storage is killing sales is contradictory.
That's my take.
And I only pushed back because you brought up key cards and claimed Switch 2's storage problem is more serious.
Most Switch 2 games are key cards, though.
All Nintendo titles are non-key-card, so that argument doesn't hold up.
Re: #36
"All Nintendo titles are non-key-card, so that argument doesn't hold up."
Turns out that was a lie.
You could easily buy cheap SD cards for the Switch.
Switch 2 uses EXSD (microSD Express), which is a lot pricier.
Game file sizes themselves are also an order of magnitude bigger, so the storage situation is completely different.
Why don't you go look up what SD card prices actually were when the Switch launched?
Back then games were only a few GB, and you could buy 128GB for a few thousand yen, so that was plenty.
SD was already a widely established standard to begin with — nothing like Switch 2's EXSD.
Dragon Quest Builders 2
NEO: The World Ends with You
DAEMON X MACHINA
Bravely Default II
Live A Live
Go Vacation
Fitness Boxing 3
Publisher: Nintendo
LOLOLOL of LOLOLOLOL ("kusa" — 5ch laughter slang, like "lol")
So that means you lose.
Because Nintendo is the one credited as the seller/distributor for those.
Lol, an idiot who doesn't even know the difference between sales and publishing.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Behind this debate is the proprietary “microSD Express” standard adopted for Switch 2. Thread posters repeatedly pointed out that it’s pricier than the old generic SD cards, making the kind of cheap storage expansion possible in the original Switch era much harder now. At the same time, there was strong criticism that the article’s core premise — that insufficient storage determines how well games sell — comes with no numerical evidence to back it up, and the central rebuttal was that this contradicts the original Switch’s track record of producing many hit titles despite having just 32GB of storage. Later in the thread, opinion split over where to draw the line on “is it really a Nintendo game,” regarding third-party-developed titles for which Nintendo is credited as the “distributor (publisher).” That’s a separate issue from the article’s main point, but it’s easy to get tangled up in since it ties into how you interpret the fact that most Nintendo titles don’t use key cards (the proprietary physical card format).
*This article was compiled as an excerpt/summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “‘Toyo Yasuda’: “PS5 and Switch 2 games don’t sell because they lack storage”” (a mocking mashup of Toyo Keizai and the author’s name, Yasuda).
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