It has come to light that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a slightly smaller adventure now than we had initially expected.
Of course, since we weren’t given a baseline for how big the playable game map is, or how long it would take to beat the game, I’m only talking about the file size. As reported by Game Rant, the web store listing for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has changed at the last minute, showing it is now 16 GB, from the original 18 GB size that was listed. Subsequently, if you look up the game in the eShop on an actual Nintendo Switch, it will show a more approximate size of 15.9 GB. You can see the web store listing for yourself here.
Since Nintendo sneaked this in at the last minute, we don’t really know the reason for the change. It is likely that this was the real size of the game at a certain point in development, but they were able to make it smaller and then just did not update the store listing until this point.
It could be one of two things. One is that the game actually became smaller in the course of development, and it may have already been a few months when this happened. In this scenario, Nintendo may have chosen not to update the listing until they were sure of what size they would be shipping the game in.
The other possibility is that Nintendo used some technology at the last minute to compress parts of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, so that it really had been 18 GB coming in to release, but Nintendo was able to shave off an additional 3 GB. Now, there is a possible good reason for this change.
Now, you may not know how Nintendo’s Switch Game Cards are made. These are proprietary to Nintendo, and manufactured by Macronix. Macronix’s specialty is in non-volatile memory, and their clients include the likes of Hewlett-Packard and LG Electronics.
The Switch game cards actually come in different capacities, similar to those found in SD cards and MicroSD cards. They run from 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, and since 2020, 64 GB.
So it may have simply been a matter of convenience that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was made to fit into a 16 GB Switch Game Card. This will make manufacturing per unit cheaper, and given the high demand expected for the title, it will also make Nintendo that much more money per unit sold.
Hopefully it doesn’t mean that we’ll need patches for it that will have to be downloaded on the Switch itself. In any case, these are all speculation as we won’t really know for sure until dataminers look for such evidence, or Nintendo just tells us themselves.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is releasing exclusively to the Nintendo Switch on May 12, 2023.
