The Truth Behind The Lego City Undercover Storage Requirements On Nintendo Switch

A lot of controversy brewed up around a misprint for Lego City Undercover on the retail box for the Nintendo Switch. Apparently a label on the box indicated that you would need both a physical copy and a digital copy of the game to run it on Nintendo's system; but the real truth behind the requirements has come to light thanks to a clarification from the publisher.

Polygon did a follow-up article after publishing a piece about Lego City Undercover requiring 13GB of free space in order to run the game on the Nintendo Switch, even if you owned a physical copy of the game on cartridge. However, this appears to have been a mistake on the manufacturer's part, because Warner Bros. sent out a statement explaining that you do not need to download additional content for Lego City Undercover if you already own the physical cartridge.

The rep for Warner Bros., stated...

This is a huge relief.

Lego City Undercover is a great (not so) little game that takes the GTA formula and condenses it down to something family friendly. It doesn't have quite as much depth as GTA or a game like Sleeping Dogs, but it makes up for it with the creative Lego-building aspects. Having a game like this made available within the launch window of the Nintendo Switch is a perfect way to lure in kids and gamers of all ages.

Of course, anyone running on a limited bandwidth service or forced to budget their downloading habits throughout the month would be royally peeved to find that after paying the full $59.99 price for the cart, they would still have to download an additional 13GB worth of data for the Nintendo Switch version of the game.

Thankfully, Warner Bros. cleared up the confusion and noted that you would not have to download the additional data for the game. So, it's standard fare business as usual.

Previously gamers were under the impression that the publishers were attempting to skimp on the physical cart sizes by going with a smaller capacity cart while offloading the rest of the game's data to the online servers. However, this turned out to be a flub on the part of the packaging.

There are other stories going around about how some publishers are raising the prices on their Nintendo Switch titles, citing high costs of production for the cartridges as the reason why. This was also an issue during the N64's age due to the size of the carts and the durability factor, but in today's market portable storage cards are extremely cheap, so the high cost of production doesn't fly with everyone. That's not to mention that some games are cheaper than the $60 price point on the Switch and other games are above the $60 price point. So, pricing seems to vary.

In the case of Lego City Undercover, at least we know that the game's on-cart data won't be gimped and gamers won't be forced to have to download 13GB worth of data if they decide to get a physical copy of the game from retailers starting next week.