Gamers Still Prefer Physical Discs Over Digital, According to Findings

[Frogger]

Hiku said:

spemanig said:

I'm not really sure that's the story here. The form factor is different than what I thought it would be, and I don't think that form-factor is conducive to digital only. Or digital at all, really.

I do still think that people would have complied, but I think that Nintendo got cold feet about it on top of, again, the form factor being portable. Think about it, a digital only platform would need what, 500GB bare minimum? That's fine for stationary hardware, but it's not happening on portable hardware anytime soon.

Well from what I recall, most people assumed there would be cross play between a handheld and a stationary from the moment NX was first announced, you included I believe. So how did you envision digital only for the handheld portion of NX back then? What about the form factor changed that?

The problem is that a handheld and a home console don't have the same expectations. For example, I expected the handheld to be vastly inferior to the home console spec-wise, which would mean lower quality assets and I assumed more compressed files. I expected the "NX Handheld" varient of Zelda for example to be far smaller in file size from the "NX Home" varient of the same game. So me having maybe 128GB of storage on my handheld would give me way more milage than it would on the home console. I looked at games like Smash and Hyrule warriors for examples. They are exponentially bigger on the Wii U then their 3DS varients. I thought NX would be the same.

Switch can't be the same because there's only one hardware SKU. The full game has to be on the portable system and look good enough to stream on the TV, which means the files are going to be console-sized. If XCX was 22GB on Wii U, it's not going to be any better on this thing, and that's not going to fly on a portable system. Nothing has enough space in that form factor to make that feesable while still being digital only.