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setsunatenshi on 25 August 2015
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RolStoppable said:
setsunatenshi said:

it's prohibitively expensive to replace discs with cards when you start getting games that are 50 GB and more. if it was a good idea, why wouldn't Nintendo use them on the Wii U?

it's so inexpensive to print discs, plus as time goes by the blu-ray players only keep dropping in price, so it should be cheaper to include one on the next console than in the current one.

the prices of games would necessarily go up and the consumer would eat the cost. last time they tried this was during the N64 era and we all saw how it went.

i don't think Nintendo would be stupid enough to do this. it would be way smarter to release a digital only wii u without the optical drive and introduce it as a 2nd sku in the market at a lower price just for people who want to get their games digitally but aren't interested in paying the 300€/$ for it.

When the Wii U was conceived, prices for SD cards above 8GB were still expensive. The situation has changed dramatically since then. It's getting to the point where the difference in price between Blu-ray and cards is going to be negligible for similar sizes of storage capacity, but cards have the advantage of higher read speeds and higher reliability (consoles with optical drives break down far more often). So consumers wouldn't have to pay more games and therefore the situation isn't even remotely comparable to the Nintendo 64.

As for a digital-only Wii U, the idea is worthless. While Nintendo might save $30 on the production of the console, they would still have to maintain the same retail price, if not raise it. No savings for consumers on the system, because retailers would demand a higher profit margin on a piece of hardware who they could sell no software for. The PSP Go was such a digital-only system and it's price was actually higher than the PSP which played physical media, because otherwise retailers wouldn't have carried it at all.


I don't believe the first part (regarding the costs on the cards), I would need to see data to change my mind.

On your second point, It's true that it would be a mess to retail a product without physical media to be sold. I do think they could test the waters by releasing some limited edition on amazon or other such online retailers. But also Nintendo seems to have the weakest online infrastructure so that would be a whole other can of worms to resolve.

Basically I think this patent doesn't actually represent a product that will be released ultimately. At least not as everyone seems to be assuming (no optical drive)