Prediction: "Cartridges" will return for the Nintendo home console

[DanneSandin]

RolStoppable said:

DanneSandin said:

I can actually see this happen! I've been thinking about it myself for quite some time. The only problem I see is the actual sizes of these "cartridges"; how many GB can they have and still be affordable? Does anyone know? I'd like to see at the very least 32GB cards. Like someone already pointed out, Xenoblade X is 20GB - so we would need bigger cartridges than that.

And like Cobretti2 and Bofferbrauer already pointed out; it would be supper cool to have additional space on the cartridges to have your save files AND additional DLC! How else are savings DLC's going to work with a unified system with two different devices?

Everyone seems to think this solution would push 3rd parties even further away from Nintendo, but I'm not too sure about that. While the Fusion consoles wouldn't be as powerful as PS5 or XB2 you'd be selling your games on two devices at the same time for the price of one! This will probably entice Japanese developers especially, since home consoles are king in the West while Handhelds rule in the East; they'll make a HH game and be able to sell it on a home console in the West, thus opening up their game for a bigger market! That is IF Nintendo do away with region locking of course. And the same goes for Western publishers as well; make a home console game in the West but cater to the handheld market in Japan at the same time.

This COULD be a great way for Nintendo to regain some 3rd party support actually!

32GB cards for the occasional game that demands so much storage shouldn't be a problem, even 64GB shouldn't be ruled out. 3DS games come in varying card sizes too; up to 8GB are possible, but the vast majority of games have settled for smaller sizes because they are cheaper to produce.

Save files on the cards will be a no-brainer (3DS games have them), but DLC is another story because it would require a significantly higher amount of reserved rewritable space and that's expensive as opposed to the read-only section of the card that stores the game. It will probably not be possible to take your game card, insert it in somebody else's console and access the DLC you bought. However, in a scenario where someone is the owner of both an NX home console and handheld, both devices would be registered to the same NNID which would allow the user to download additional content to the internal/external storage of both devices, so both systems could access DLC without problems. Similarly, someone who buys exclusively digital will have to download the games themselves to both devices, but only pay for one copy.

There's just on thing that a bit of a pain in the ass though: you'll have to download EVERYTHING twice; once for your HC and once for your HH. Downloading patches twice, downloading DLC's twice... that's a bit cumpersome. Hopefully Nintendo will implement some sort of "Automatically download this content for ALL your NNID connected devices at the same time". That way you can download the DLC on your HC and the same content will get installed on your HH at the same time when it's in sleep mode. The second problem then becomes available space in the HH device: that shit's gonna get filled crazy fast! It'll be hugely expansive to have loads of DLC on your HH, or if not hugely expansive you'll probably need quite a few more extra SD-cards to save all that content on, which will become annoying when you have to swtch cards all the time depending on what games you play