| SegataSanshiro said: This is speculation. Pretty sure the company Nintendo partnered with worked with them so keep costs way down. The cost for a Blu Ray pressed is 2 dollars. A MASK Rom costs $2.50. So this is not a huge leap over Blu Ray cost. More expensive yes,but not by much. Again people seem to think Carts of 1996 and it's issues apply to ones made in 2017. For the most part not the case anymore. |
Those figures are clearly completely wrong. Here in the UK you have retail budget blu-rays that sell for £1. Yes they are terrible movies but they still have to be duplicated so cost can't be any more than about 30c to make. $2.50 is probably the lowest capacity of 1GB with 32GB probably twice that or more and Nintendo will put its own profit on top of that which is what Publishers will have pay.
Cartridges are expensive and that's why Sony and Microsoft use optical discs because once the drive cost has been paid for they can deliver games to retail at very low costs. Nintendo were forced to use cartridges as its a portable system and hence prices are more expensive. There are no surprises here, everyone and their dog knows cartridges will be more expensive. It's the reason the Switch is only fitted with 32GB of flash memory. When we can buy mass produced in their millions 32GB micro sd cards for $1 you'll have a point. Not forgetting Macronix don't even have the economy of scale of SD cards but they only have to design in a single write. However they also have to write the code to the flash memory which is an additional manufacturing process. It's still flash memory in cartridges even though cartridges are now designed to completely disable any writing to this flash memory and use the console's own storage for game saves.
