| Soundwave said: 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. |
As opposed to discs with 2x the space in the same bulk for 10 cents a pop. Let's not act like that isn't a significant difference, because it is. Why would any sane developer look at the PS4 where it costs X to ship their game, look at the XBO where it costs X to ship their game, and then look at the NX where it costs significantly more to port the exact same game and go "WORTH IT." It doesn't matter if it isn't earth shattering. The difference is significant with absolutely no benefit to the developer at all. The aren't going to simply pay more just for the joy of it, and they aren't going to hike up the price of just the NX version.
No, they'd use the larger cards, just like they use larger discs.
Of course the format will decide something. It'll decide if Nintendo even has a chance at third party support to begin with. With carts, which aren't happening, the answer is a loud no.
