Most Xbox 360 games would fit on a DVD but did that stop Microsoft from moving to Blu-ray discs ? 

Nintendo keeping file sizes small is relative in this case when EVERY generation they too needed bigger storage sizes to make their games so what exactly is stoping them from exploring more games in the tens of gigabytes for the NX ?

I'm sure discs are cheaper to mass produce...

I understand the argument that you are trying to present, but you can't honestly think that Nintendo would be paying the prices for SD Memory cards as what you are finding on Amazon! The company would get great wholesale prices and the major difference between using a card storage medium now versus the N64 days is SD cards are a major standard now. There were so many different types of storage formats that nothing remotely to the size speed and price of current SD cards existed. So not even just making it exclusive to the SD card format, even if the decided to go with some kind of flash Rom it's far more advanced and cheaper than that of the N64.

I noticed some people are pretty much arguing against possibilities when we know next to nothing about the NX... I also see that many like to conclude for Nintendo to be successful everything is about catching lightening in a bottle. Which is such a disservice to a company that's not only been around for a long time but very profitable as well, even before the Wii and DS came along. Nintendo hasn't had close to equal 3rd party support since maybe the GC days and 3rd party companies weren't what made both the DS and Wii successful, it was all Nintendo coming up with something clever...

No one is saying Nintendo will pay retail, what is being argued is that one medium is naturally more expensive to produce than the other and not by a little bit but by a lot. The question is, why would Nintendo eat up into their own profits of they have a cheaper option. 

I don't know where you got that i was saying nintendo will pay amazon prices for their storage medium. I clearly pointed out what the cost will be after you take out retailer markups. If on amazon it cost $20, then nintendo cant get that at anything less than $5, or even if you want you can say $2. Thats writing of 90% of the cost as a retailer markup. 

Thst still lesves you with one medium costing around 10c-25c and another costing $2-$5. Doesn't sound like much, until you start counting in the millions. 

And about the cards or type of cards used, first understnd that atorage media isnt onky determined by their capacity. The speed of such media is also very important. Their availability too. And its ludicrous to even be talking about N64 carts...... what was the size of the biggest N64 game? 50MB? 100MB?..... hell, lets even say 400MB and i know they  werent that big. A modern HD game with texture rez that will look halfway decent at 1080p wont come in anythjng less than 15GB today, unless nintendo wants to make games that look like 360 games. This all brings me to the soeed of the carts...

A class 10 SD card has a transfer speed of 10MB/s - 30MB/s. Thats how quickly you can move data from the cart to system ram or an internal HDD. SD cards tech are the most popular and common card tech out there today. Which means they sre the cheapest. If you want, you can use SDXC tech instead, ramp up transfer speeds to over 90MB/s, but those are more expensive.... and if nintendo goes with a proprietary card tech, then that will be most expensive, since they will be the only ones using it. 

No matter how its spun, carts cost more than discs.... amd there simoly are no benefits to them besides durability. 

Lets make something clear.....

Good first party games alone is not enough to make a successful platform. Nintendo should kjow that very well from the N64, GC and the WiiU. Cause nintendo does have some of the best first party games out there. 

So nintendo has two options.

Get third party support that is at least on par with Sony and MS which also means having hardware that is at least as powerful as theirs with similar features or,

Catch lightning in a bottle (again) as they did with the wii and come up with something that is so different and unique to them that everyone wants a piece of it and can only be had on their platform. They tried that with the WiiU with its controller but failed. 

Its really not complicated, if you arent directly pound for pound competing with the HD twins, then you have to be different enough to succeed withoit most of the things that makes them successful.

I'm all for Nintendo using cards for NX. It will make the home console a lot smaller (they could make the console as small as the original Wii), less prone to breaking and reduce loading times. Also, if they want us to play the games on both home console and handheld there is no way they are using discs. A card could be popped into both systems.

One word: Patches

So Nintendo needs to either copy the others or "catch lightning in a bottle"? I think that term is used way too loosely.

The funnly thing about people saying going with cartridges would kill 3rd party support is that 3DS & Vita have significantly stronger 3rd party support than Wii U.