By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
SuperNova on 14 February 2017
Edit Thread
bonzobanana said:
SuperNova said:

 

At the risk of repeating myself, but the manufacturer of both the 3DS ans Switch cartiges annouced (either in late 2015 or early 2016 can't remember now) that they had the manufacuring cost of 32GB carts down to the manufacturing cost of a BD.

This is probably why the 32GB carts are the maximum available size as of summer 2016. They are probably working on getting 64GB down in cost as we speak and it's not unreasonable to assume that they will become available to publishers at a BD pricepoint within the switches lifetime. Other than that, devs will just have to use compression. Many games these days are barely compressed and would probably fit on 32GB easily with clever compression work.

Absolutely no way they could make a 32GB cartridge for the price of a bluray disc. I've seen bluray films (poor one's) designed to retail at about £1 and must cost in the region of 20p or so to make. If flash memory or any type of random access memory was as cheap as that it would be a revolution in hardware prices. Why the hell is the Switch fitted with so little storage memory. The maximum size of launch Switch cartridges appears to be 8GB (64Gb) and 16GB (128Gb) but most games appear to be on much smaller cartridges.

Do you have a link for this 32GB equals bluray manufacturing cost. How much is a writable bluray disc because they normally cost more than pressed blurays and still pretty cheap. 

My guess for a bluray disc duplicating cost would be about 30c/25p and for a cartridge by Macronix lets say 8GB and 16GB would be $3 and $4.50.  However most Switch games seem to be on very small capacity cartridges so probably somewhere around $1-2.

Third parties seem to be highly motivated to bring small games to Switch. Hence ports of old small games or simple games like Bomberman. It seems third parties are highly motivated to keep their game sizes very small to lower their cartridge costs. There is absolutely no indication of low cartridge costs.

I looked it up for you, it was in Macronix finacial report for 2016. The gains are possible because Macronix switched from 75nm manufactoring process (3DS carts) to 32nm (Switch carts).

This link states the 23GB at cost of BD for Nintendo, presumambly in bulk: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/05/why-nintendo-nxs-rumored-shift-from-discs-to-cartridges-is-actually-smart/

This one is about the manifacturing process: https://mynintendonews.com/2016/05/05/rumour-nintendo-nx-to-return-to-cartridges/

There also was a whole thread about it on this very forum about it but I honestly can't be arsed to find it again.

As for cost, these are ROM carts, possibly with a tiny little flash portion for savefiles, so they are largely non-rewritable and an entirely diffrent beast from the Switches 32gig of internal storage or even any SD/Micro SD cards you might be thinking of. ROM is generally much cheaper to produce than flash.