Miyamotoo said:
1. We dont know if publishers taking costs of cartridges or that will be done buy Nintendo, also SD cards in bulks of millions are dirt cheap. There will not be limited storage on cartridges, you will have cartridges from 8GB tu 64GB, not to mention that games can easily fit in much less GBs than that they are on XB1/PS4. 4. Flash memory prices (Switch cartridge) are constantly falling like a rock. 5. We dont know about infrastructure and DRM system for Switch, we know DeNa is helping them.
Its most important that Switch is technical very modern console that supports all modern engines, so from technical point evre PS4/XB1 game could be ported to Switch without problems. If we talk how much 3rd party support Switch will actualy have, that mostly depends from popularity and sales of Switch itself, if actual sales and become popular Switch will have more 3rd parties and more 3rd party games. |
The publishers buy cartridges off Nintendo who have to put their own markup on and Nintendo themselves buy them from Macronix and they are not SD cards they are proprietory and not made with the economies of scale of SD cards which is highly competitive with many manufacturers competing. If its like the N64, publishers had to order a minimum number of cartridges, something like 50,000. Nintendo aren't going to be paying for the cartridges (except their own games of course). Macronix do cartridges by Gigabit not Gigabyte and Nintendo announced cartridges of 32Gb and 64Gb in size so will be 4GB and 8GB in size likely with heavy compression. However many people disagree with me on this so we shall see but I was right about 3DS capacities and suspect I'll be right again with the Switch. Cartridges can only afford to cost a few dollars and we won't be seeing 64GB cartridges at all I bet or if we do it will be because Switch as sold very well and continues to be sold for many years and we get those capacities at the end.
Largest 3DS game so far is Xenblade for the new 3DS at 4GB. Games like mario maker are 512MB. List of roms here but note the rom sizes are bits not bytes so share the number by 8 to get the real value in megabytes.
I guess xenoblade works out at about half the size on new 3DS compared to the optical disc for wii but compression ratio's have gradually increased as processing power has increased so its possible switch games could have slightly better compression. I'm expecting major Switch games to be 4 or 8GB in size at launch with minor titles considerably less. I think the smallest 3DS titles were 128MB.
I wouldn't be surprised if Zelda breath of the wind is a 4GB cartridge or 32Gb using the normal macronix type descriptions that might provide about 10-12GB of uncompressed data. However I feel 8GB is more likely. Don't assume 8GB though because most of the 3DS games were much smaller than most people expected in rom size including myself. Nintendo will always for the minimum cost to increase margins.
