Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card Overview
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Ceremony can be a PITA,.no argument here.
But I would be shocked if Nintendo made a digital "eject" erase anything on the local console.
Yeah, it would be insane if the game's also uninstalled, but that second system still needs to be at hand or someone needs to "eject" it. It's a really dumb system.
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Yeah, it definitely puts their overhaul of digital game sharing in perspective. They are ABSOLUTELY shifting to digital. I wouldn't be surprised if the Switch 2 Lite had no cartridge slot at all.
That said, their idea here seems to be that you have a physical cart with a game license in it so you can download the game on multiple consoles and then just swap the key around. That is not a new idea, but it goes to show how frustrated by the limitations of having to ship flash memory with every game they are.
More like, they’ve never been known to pass the savings to the consumer on the digital front. Some games were more expensive on the e shop than physical copies from time to time iirc.
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I don't know that Nintendo was forcing the issue for profit. I also don't know the costs and margins (if any) for Nintendo or who they were working with to get the storage, to be fair. But I have to assume that if Nintendo had signficantly cheaper access to storage and was artificially throttling to everybody else you'd have seen more first party games on larger carts, and that wasn't necessarily the case.
Regardless, any solid state storage was always going to be more expensive than optical storage and scale up with size gradually in a way that optical storage doesn't (until you have to go to a second disk or an additional layer, at least). Cartridges are just inherently riskier and more expensive, even at the relatively modest spec of the Switch 1. Definitely with what seems like competitive speeds in Switch 2.
That doesn't mean one has to like the consequences of it. At the same time I'm not sure I can imagine a realistic alternative for a portable. We're not doing UMD again, so...
The point about Nintendo not having significantly larger sizes on games could be attributed to a few things:
- Their developers were sometimes exclusively making Nintendo games = more familiar with the hardware and how to use it effectively
- They were guaranteed to sell a few million copies of a game = they could afford to run the numbers on refactoring the games resources and asset logic to maximize cartridge size. With the scale of sales, this could cover a specialized developer exclusively optimizing techniques to save on that front
- Many third party studios run their games through some converter and fix what’s remaining, the result are turd sized and non-optimized executables. E.g.: see iOS and Android app and game install sizes.
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No. You have to download the game and need the cartridge to play it.
People are referring to damaged physical media = can’t play it. That’s always been the case. You mixed 2 different things into the same point, which are wildly distinct and why people say they agree partially.
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