There’s been a little bit of speculation recently that Wolfenstein: Youngblood’s physical editions wouldn’t come with a cartridge. Today, we can confirm the reports.
Multiple listings for the game popped up last week in the US, and most of them indicated that the game, even when bought physically, would only be available via a digital download code. This seemingly applied to both the standard and deluxe editions, the former of which is not available in Australia and Europe.
EB Games seemed to dispute this in a reply to a twitter user yesterday, saying that Wolfenstein: Youngblood’s Deluxe Edition “will be a physical game, and not a download code.”
However, that doesn’t seem to be the case. We reached out to Bethesda Australia for confirmation, and a company spokesperson confirmed that, unfortunately, the Deluxe Edition of Wolfenstein: Youngblood “will just have a download code inside the box” in Australia.
This isn’t the first time this has happened on the Switch. Last year’s Big Bash Boom, made by Australian developers Big Ant, was also limited to a download code inside its physical packaging. The Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Trilogy, which hit shelves earlier this year after an eShop release early last year, also faced a similar fate.
It’s particularly a problem in Australia, where our internet speeds and reliability is so incredibly poor; for a lot of people Down Under, physical copies of games are the only way to play a game on launch day, if at all.
It’s hard to place all the blame on the developers and publishers of these games however, the cost of large Switch cartridges is much higher than the cost of publishing on a Blu-ray Disc. Nintendo could (and probably should) be doing more to ease the high price of entry for those wishing to publish larger games physically.
In the meantime, we’re stuck with digital downloads for these larger games for the foreseeable future. Hopefully it won’t take up too much space on the SD card.
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