Star Wars Outlaws on Switch 2 uses game-key for performance

We return to talk about game keys, the controversial physical medium introduced with Nintendo Switch 2, criticized by many because it does not contain the actual game, but only serves as a key to authorize the download. Fortunately for traditional cartridge fetishists, the house of Mario has confirmed that it will not use game keys for first-party titles; however, many third-party games do use them, and among them is Star Wars Outlaws.

Game Key not for saving money, but for technical necessity

Star Wars Outlaws has just been launched on Switch 2 and adopts game keys not for cost reasons, but out of necessity. This is the picture that emerges from the words of Rob Bantin, who handles the audio architecture for Snowdrop, the graphics engine of Outlaws. According to Bantin, traditional Switch 2 cartridges would not have guaranteed the performance desired by Ubisoft, an inconvenience that was overcome by choosing game keys.

The reason is that the Snowdrop engine relies heavily on data streaming from disk for open-world environments (evidently, the data transmission speed from Switch 2 cartridges would not have been enough to satisfy this need). Bantin adds that Outlaws was conceived with the SSDs of the initial platforms in mind: if it had been born on Switch 2 instead, perhaps things would have gone differently.

Snowdrop relies heavily on disk streaming for its open world environments, and we found the Switch 2 cards simply didn’t give the performance we needed at the quality target we were going for. I don’t recall the cost of the cards ever entering the discussion - probably because it was moot.

— Rob Bantin (@cubusaddendum.bsky.social) Sep 4, 2025 at 20:51