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Intrinsic on 20 January 2015
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JazzB1987 said:

Just because you took a random price does not make the thing cost 50 bucks for everyone. I can easily get one for sub 30 VAT included. And thats an arbitrary price set by Toshiba for consumers. The wifi chip probably costs a dollar.  Nintendo will get mass discount and tax discount(or not pay taxes at all like in Germany)

And I am obviously not saying that games should come on SD cards (piracy whohoo!) but that e.g Vita and 3DS cards and newer consoles could have similar technology. The SD card transfer rate is also slow because the SD card is so slim. A 3DS version would automatically be faster because there is simply more space for better Wifi technology.


At least try the next time you reply...

Errrr OK. Sorry, wasn't taking you seriously the first time. Honestly  thought your suggestion was silly or a joke for what I would consider obvious reasons and didn't even think you were taking it seriously. But I stand corrected. 

First off, what I showed you wasn't a random price. Its the price of a SD card from a reputable manufacturer that is 32GB and also class 10. And the reason the card is slow has nothing to do with WiFi. Its simply the SD card specification standards. Unless you do not know what the classes stand for in SD card descriptions.

I don't know how old you are, but the gaming industry has done cartridges before. About 20 years ago. All the reasons we moved on to Discs still hold true today. Greater capacity and infinately cheaper. No matter how you spin it, even at OEM pricing, It would cost any publisher over $25 for a single SD card with a capacity of 50GB. Which ultimately means that game prices will go up to $80 minimum. 

And what you don't know about handhelds using SD card like storage mediums, its not a plus, they would do away with them in a heartbeat if they could. Its a compromise they have to make cause you can't get disc media reliably and durably into such a small pro table form factor. 

The closest thing to cartridges (though technically we already have them in HDDs) we will have anytime soon are SSDs (be it sata/m.2). The reason its viable is cause it can match the capacity of conventional HDDs today and far exceeds their performance and durability. But most importantly, its cost is shared across all the games you buy over the course of a generation. That means that while it may cost Sony/ms/Nintendo $50 to put in a 1TB ssd in 2019/2020, that is  still significantly better (in both cost and performance) from making consumers pay $15/$20 more for every game they buy cause you want to put them on a "portable cartridge"