As we move towards a digital gaming future, there's an increasing desire by some players to make sure their investment is safe, and that often means opting for physical releases over downloads. After all, companies like Nintendo and Sony can remove access to your collection as the years roll on, but a physical cartridge or disc is yours forever—at least in theory.
The perils of 'disc rot' have been well documented, with poorly pressed CDs and DVDs eventually becoming unplayable over time. We've also seen horror stories about 3DS games dying, but, in the case of more modern physical media, there's always been the reassurance that consoles like Switch and Switch 2 use game cards which are non-rewriteable, which should, in theory, make them more robust.
This is because flash media, like MicroSD cards, only has a limited number of write cycles before it dies. However, it has since been discovered that even Switch cartridges are writable to some degree, and could potentially die if not treated properly.
In a post on social media by Does it Play?, it is pointed out that Switch actually uses XtraROM, which is described as "a fancy term for factory-programmed MLC NAND flash."
The screenshotted report goes on to explain that the Switch is designed to "refresh" the data on the game card periodically to ensure that it remains readable and in good order. So even though these games aren't "written to" when you save your in-game data, some low-level re-writing takes place nonetheless.
It therefore stands to reason that, if you don't plug a game into your console for a while, the data may become unreadable. The post speculates that between five and ten years is a good benchmark for this, which presents the obvious problem: if you have sealed games you're hoping will increase in value over time, these could potentially become unplayable at some point.
The counterpoint to that, of course, is that nobody should really buy a brand-new game in order for it to sit on their shelf and never be used for its intended purpose.
Do you regularly cycle your physical games to ensure they're still playable? Or do you perhaps think this issue has been overhyped? Let us know with a comment below.