News: 3DS eShop Has a File Size Limit of 2GB Page 1

3DS eShop Has a File Size Limit of 2GB

27.02.2012

3DS eShop Has a File Size Limit of 2GB on Nintendo gaming news, videos and discussion

Update: Unfortunately, Tommy Refenes was misquoted, with him merely stating he thinks 2GB would be a reasonable size, and not that the 3DS eShop limit is such.

Original Story: Team Meat were once aiming to get their highly regarded downloadable title, Super Meat Boy, onto WiiWare. Unfortunately, file size restrictions of 40MB stopped the company from ever being able to. Speaking to Nintendo Gamer, Tommy Refenes from Team Meat, explained the situation again. He stated that if they'd had a few more megabytes to work with, they would have been able to bring the game to the service. Furthermore, he added: "You can only compress stuff so much before you have to start cutting out huge parts of your game. Unfortunately, at that point, it just isn’t worth the time."

Refenes has revealed that the 3DS' eShop offers a more reasonable service, in terms if file size, allowing developers to produce games up to 2GB. He also said he'd love to be able to bring their upcoming games to Nintendo's new system, the Wii U.

Comment on this article

Comments

«s previous1next »

RudyC3 28.02.2012#1

If this gets us at last the games that developers didn't bring on Wiiware or DSiWare because the filesize limitations were ridiculously low (and I agree with them), then that's good news. Let's hope that now that this problem is sorted, they'll bring out the big guns (Castlevania Symphony of the Night on the eShop like you did with PSN and XBLA Konami Smilie ?)

( Edited 28.02.2012 00:20 by Kafei2006 )

Cubed3 Limited Staff :: Review and Feature Writer

JoshSL 28.02.2012#2

I wonder if Sonic 4 is possible on 3DS then.
I'd kinda like that.

Twitter | C3 Writer/Moderator | Backloggery

Azuardo 28.02.2012#3

Unfortunately, this is a misquote.

He didn't say the 3DS' eShop limits were 2GB at all; just that that's what he thought would be a reasonable size. So it could in fact be a lot less. There may not be a limit at all. We don't know.

( Edited 28.02.2012 00:48 by Azuardo )

Guest 28.02.2012#4

Gamecube games....

Sonic_13 28.02.2012#5

2GB didn't make sense to me as soon as I read it due to the fact that 3DS systems only come with a 2GB SD card. I don't think Nintendo would allow for one downloadable game to take up nearly most of the system's memory.

Obviously you can expand with higher capacity game cards, but Nintendo is going to leave that to people who have downloaded a lot of games versus developers who want to make an extremely large game.

irfy 28.02.2012#6

This is one of the areas i'm currently studying at Uni is limitation within games, downsizing games and sticking to a certain amount of gb/mb to make a game. I dont mind downloading games that are over 2gb but that begs the question on the 3DS, what was the limitation of the SD, 32gb?

Nintendo should really look into cloud gaming with their new Nintendo Network, it's something which pretty much every game company is looking at

DazJ 28.02.2012#7

Anyone still remember the VIC-20 .. 3.5k limit - now THAT was a challenge! Smilie

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those that understand binary and those that don't ..

Darkflame 29.02.2012#8

2GB would be very,very silly.
You would whipe out 90% of the market - many people either use the default SD, or have connections too poor to download that quickly.

Also mr Meat Team, if you need that space for a download game you are horribly inefficient coders.

Anyone still remember the VIC-20 .. 3.5k limit - now THAT was a challenge!

Only had a inherited Plus/4 myself which was a gen later, but yes, these days developers spend more space on a font space then whole games took in the past.

( Edited 29.02.2012 10:25 by Darkflame )

http://www.fanficmaker.com <-- Tells some truly terrible tales.
Last update; Mice,Plumbers,Animatronics and Airbenders. We also have the socials; Facebook & G+.

Mush 29.02.2012#9

Darkflame said:
2GB would be very,very silly.
You would whipe out 90% of the market - many people either use the default SD, or have connections too poor to download that quickly.
Also mr Meat Team, if you need that space for a download game you are horribly inefficient coders.

Again you're getting the wrong end of the stick. Mr Refenes' never actually mentioned the 3DS or the eShop. He only ever mentioned WiiWare. He was referring to that. 2GB would be a nice limit (for a home console), but even if the limit was something like 500mb it would be great.

I don't think developers should be limited though.. they should be free enough to add as much content into a game as they wish, but then they should probably be forced to compress it maybe just a little. If only Nintendo raised the bar on the WiiWare limit back then, Team Meat would've made SMB for WiiWare because it was something that Nintendo fans were really interested in. It would've allowed the service to have more great games too. Oh and even after SMB went under the compression process, it was still a little too big for WiiWare.

( Edited 29.02.2012 11:26 by Mush123 )

Darkflame (guest) 29.02.2012#10

(Darkflame on a guest pc)

Again you're getting the wrong end of the stick. Mr Refenes' never actually mentioned the 3DS or the eShop. He only ever mentioned WiiWare.

Where people have even smaller SD cards by default?
How does that change anything?

WiiWares 40MB might have been too small (for some things - even the massive full retail games on the GBA in far less space I still find it amazing .any tilebased game struggles to fit in that)..but 2GB is stupid.

Its like saying �Skateboards are not good enough for transportations, therefor we all need trucks�

btw, I am a developer myself of various commissioned webgames. I know something of game optimization and compression.