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Nuvendil on 08 September 2017
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fatslob-:O said:
Nuvendil said:

The biggest difference is speed.  The Switch Game Card is a touch slower than the internal NAND on Switch, so just a bit bellow a 5200 RPM hard drive that is found in the PS4 and Xbone.  Not slow, but not particularly fast either.  The N64 Game Pak on the other hand was exceptionally fast relative to its day.  They were so fast, data could be streamed from the Game Pak in real-time as if it were simply normal RAM.  That's a ludicrous notion and something the Game Card comes nowhere near to.  So one is using run of the mill flash memory, the other was  leading edge. 

Second difference is added components for writable storage.  The Game Card format just has an extra little chip for that.  But Switch game cards don't even have that, only DS and 3DS do.  The Game Pak had EEPROM, another Flash chip, or in numerous instances battery backed up RAM.  And the size of the Game Pak further increases its costs in materials.

There's always going to be trade-offs in engineering ... (what N64 game paks did to optimize for speed and capacity is different to what Swtch game cards did to optimize for density and cost efficiency) 

Devs are not on the same page as you are when it comes to the cost of bigger Switch game card sizes ... 

DQH 1&2 - ~80USD

RE:RC - ~40USD and the rest of the collection has to be downloaded which is bigger than what's stored in the game card itself ...

Lastly we have L. A. Noire ... 

It seems like every time that a Switch game uses 16GB game cards there's always compromises abound ...

Flip back a few posts.  Industry analysts say it's about 60% more.  We are talking less than $10 - at most $6 - more than PS4 and Xbone. And more favorable relations and buying larger quantities will drive that down further to 5, 4, even 3.   So yes, they are raising prices to offset this small added cost.  No they are not raising it according to that increase.  They are raising it by "industry standard" increments and based on what they can get away with.  Unless you seriously believe they needed to charge that much for DQXI to make good margins and didn't do it to capitalize on the launch situation and the powerful DQ license.

Oh and all of that applies to the 32GB card.  16 will be lower, probaly 3 dollars more at the absolute worst if you plan a limited run.  Probably more like 1 or 2 dollars difference.  

Tl;dr:  the extra 10 does recoup costs but it also nets them extra margins abkve and beyond. And if you think PUBLISHERS (not devs, PUBLISHERS) - the same publishers that push absurd preorder bonuses, launch day DLC, content carving, season passes, numerous exorbitantly prjced collector's and limited editions, microtransactions - wouldn't do that, you're kidding yourself.