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Soundwave on 25 August 2015
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spemanig said:
Soundwave said:

Discs are going bye bye. I think you're just gonna kind of have to get used to that idea. 

I don't really give a crap about discs to be honest. I don't care what format the games come on, because once I put the game on, I spend literally 0 seconds thinking about the format it's on. Nothing screams "hey remember 1997!" more than a shiny phyiscal disc these days anyway, so it's not even like "optical discs are cool man" because they sure as hell are not anymore. 

It's not like the N64 days where the games were really storage starved, today you can get a massive amount of data onto a disc, a postage stamp sized card, a flash drive, whatever and for cheap. 


I'm not talking about discs. I'm glad they're gone. I'm talking about going back to carts. Third parties would love an all digital platform. They wouldn't love paying 10x the price of discs just to port to NX, which they would be with carts. You can say what ever you want about how cheap carts are now, but the fact is they'd stil be significantly more expensive than a disk of equal size. 

Who says it's 10x the price of a disc? I can get 32GB SD Cards if I'm willing to order in 1000 pieces bulk for about $1 a pop. Imagine the price for Nintendo ordering 5 million of them. 

Even if it is literally 10x the cost of a disc, if a disc costs 10 cents to press, that means the cartridge you're talking about is ... $1 at a production level. 

Not exactly earth shattering. It isn't the 90s or even 2000s anymore, flash memory has indeed become dirt cheap and there are work-arounds to these situations. 

To be honest I could see some developers going with 16GB cards, which can store likely the first large chunk (several hours worth) of most games, and then the rest just downloads quietly onto the HDD. That's something you could not do in the N64 days, and this is something that's even done on the PS4/X1 all the time ... half the damn games on the system you can't even play because there's some patch or a ton of data that wasn't on the disc for what ever reason. 

The format really isn't going to decide anything. What demographics Nintendo can bring in and to what number of those they can get is ultimately what a third party is going to look at when deciding how much (if any) support will be given.