Are Nintendo Switch games saved on the cartridge?

The Nintendo Switch might be selling like hotcakes, but that’s in spite of a few questionable design decisions by Nintendo. I mean, only 32GB of onboard storage gets filled up pretty darn quickly. Zelda: Breath of the Wild is over 13GB, and that’s without accounting for the operating system or game save files.

With that kind of restriction on space, you’d think that save files could be backed up, stored to SDcards or the game cartridge, or even uploaded to the cloud. Only some of these things can be done so read on to find which:

So.. are your Nintendo Switch save files stored on the cartridge?

Short answer: No

Nintendo, in its inestimable wisdom, decided that game save files will live on the Nintendo Switch console’s onboard memory, not on game cartridges. I can only imagine some of that was because of the 32GB storage limit of the game cartridges.

What’s more, until recently you couldn’t even transfer those save files off of the console, making your game progress tied to the hardware. Because yanno, consoles never break or get lost or stolen, right Ninty?

READ MORE: How to change your region on the Switch

If you pay for Nintendo Switch Online, you can back up most, but not all, of your game saves to the cloud. Yay, finally Nintendo’s latest console (almost) has all of the modern conveniences we’ve become accustomed to.

Surprised that the Switch doesn’t store saves on the game cards? How do you backup your game files? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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