Today Take-Two Interactive revealed its release schedule for all of its games coming out in the near future. There weren’t any huge surprises on the list (pictured below). Read Dead Redemption 2 is still slated for a Spring 2018 release, XCOM 2‘s latest DLC is releasing on the same day as Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (why, God?!), and WWE 2K18 and NBA 2K18 are still coming to the Nintendo Switch. Except there is one peculiarity there. It would seem NBA 2K18 is getting a bit of a staggered release on the Nintendo Switch.
As you can see from the roadmap above, the Nintendo Switch version of NBA 2K18 will be releasing on September 19 along with the PS4 and Xbox One versions, but only digitally. The physical version of NBA 2K18 will be coming to the Nintendo Switch later, some time in the fall. This struck us as incredibly strange, and Take-Two didn’t offer any explanation as to why this would be the case.
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It may seem like a small issue, but this actually might make a big difference for many Switch owners. Being a AAA game, we expect NBA 2K18 to take up a decent amount of space — at least 10-15 gigs or so. Storage on the Nintendo Switch’s internal drive is absolutely precious, and even if you opted to buy a bigger microSD card for your digital games, most of you are looking at 128GB max; most likely much less if you’ve been buying a lot of games since March.
We’re hoping very much that Take-Two isn’t gauging the digital version’s success as a means to decide how much of the physical version to produce, because many Switch owners will likely be holding out for the physical version to buy. We’re also hoping that reports don’t start flooding in right after launch of how poorly the Switch version sold compared to the Xbox One and PS4 versions. The Switch doesn’t need that kind of publicity for third-party publishers right now, and it wouldn’t be Nintendo’s fault if physical game collectors are left drumming their fingers and waiting for a proper release.
If we hear from Take-Two or 2K as to why the physical version is being stalled, we’ll update you straight away.
