How to delete games and saved games on nintendo switch

Since the Nintendo Switch launched with games in the form of cartridges (or memory chips), many questions have been raised regarding the storage of games and saved games. In the following paragraphs we will detail how to delete games and all the games saved on Nintendo Switch.

Index of contents

Nintendo Switch only has 32GB of storage space

The new Nintendo console now uses cartridges to distribute its games, this has an advantage, it is not necessary to install the games on the console (although it does store a small amount of data), as it happens on the XBOX One or Playstation 4, that, although we buy the games in physical form, in any case, they must be stored on disk to function.

The inconvenience arises when we want to buy games in digital format. Nintendo Switch only has 32GB of internal memory, which seem insufficient today. If this is your case, you will have to erase games as you play. Now we are going to teach you how to delete the games and also their saved games in this game console.

Deleting games on Nintendo Switch

1. We turn on the console and press the A button Next, we are going to unlock the console completely by pressing three times A Once you are on the home screen, find the game you want to delete and highlight it with the Joy-Con joystick With the game selected press the '+' or '-' button of any of the two Joy-Con In the next step we will see several options, we are interested in going to Manage Software The console will give us two options at this point, we can archive or delete the game. If we decide to delete the game, it will erase not only the data stored in the memory but also the saved games.

If we decide to archive, only the game data will be deleted, but the saved games and the shortcut on the home screen will be kept.

Deleting only saved games

What if we only want to delete the saved games keeping the game stored? Fortunately Nintendo has thought about this and it won't be necessary to delete the game to delete saved games. The console has a special section to manage the games saved in the console, it is called Data management, so we are going to go for it.

1. We are going to go to Home and then open the Settings option. In the menu on the right we are going to go to Data Management. Inside we choose the option Manage Save Data / Screenshots. In the fourth step we choose the Delete Save Data option. Select the game you want to delete all saved games from and it will be done. Note that then there is no way to recover that data.

Reinstalling games

Let's assume that we have deleted a game to free up space and after a while we are interested in playing it again. If the game is in digital format, we will have to download it again from the eShop, but if we have the cartridge it is possible to reinstall it from the eShop itself with the game connected to the console, as seen in the image above.

To give an example, Zelda Breath of the Wild requires about 13GB of storage space if we want to play it digitally.

Final advice

If you want to avoid all this, you can acquire some microSD memory to store the games there without constantly erasing them. Switch allows to store games in this type of units, it is much more comfortable and they are quite economic. A 128GB memory costs only about 40 euros, which is already 4 times the capacity of the Nintendo Switch. I hope this guide has been useful to you and see you in the next one.

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