GProgrammer said:
You're miss reading the article, there they say "The biggest detail lacking in Screen Critics' report is any confirmation that Macronix's next fiscal year will include a ramping-up of 32GB-capacity chips—and selling such chips to Nintendo at a cost comparable to Blu-ray discs. " 'lacking' perhaps english isnt your native language bu they're not saying they're going to cost roughly similar to blu-ray. In fact the rest of the article says the ROMs are going to be more expensive than blu-ray, but they're speculating. I want actual data. I did go online with alibaba, the cheapest place on the web to buy stuff, and the best deal I could find were blank ROM's at smaller capacity to a blu-ray costing 500% more, not 5% more 500% more. 500% more for less capacity and they're blank, The bluray is with the game written onto it. I agree rom's are better for a portable device like the switch, but they're certainly not as cheap |
I brought up the Nintendo Life link earlier regarding the 8 GB cart being priced similarly to the BD counterpart. The primary argument against my link appears to be the cost of the BD discs versus the cost of cartridges. There are a few things wrong with looking at this situation by directly looking at the cost.
1. Neither Nintendo nor Sony are selling the physical media at the cost they are produced. If you read the article, they talk about how the developer is at that price also receiving packaging and other items for publishing. In addition, it is quite likely that both companies are making a certain amount of profit on every unit of physical media sold to publishers (much like how they make profit on the revenues of developers on their digital stores). Hence, Nintendo is simply pricing the 8GB cart package similarly to the BD package offered by Sony and MS.
2. The flash memory inside devices like Vita and Switch is not the same as things as SD Cards. So looking at bulk prices of SD Cards on sites like Alibaba is not a good indicator. The flash memory on used on these cartridges is designed for a much smaller number writes compared that what is in SD cards, and hence these cards should be much cheaper to produce. Although, with that being it is probably correct that looking just at cost, disks cost less than carts. Hence, why Sony and MS offer fewer SKUs for publishers for physical media on disk based consoles.
3. Both 3DS and Vita had carts ranging from 1-8 GBs. In the case of the 3DS, the carts were much more sophisticated compared to what comes Switch and Vita (the 3DS carts had a seperate writable chip for saves as well as native interfaces that would allow for carts to expand hardware functionality). Despite this both 3DS and Vita games cost considerably less than the home console games despite using carts.
4. Currently I believe most of the Switch games that are simultaneously released at a higher price than their counterparts are the ones on the 16 GB and 32 GB carts. This is currently a problem that mass production can fix over time. Moreover, this does not apply to this game (which can fit on a 4 GB cart).
With regards to this specific situation with Capcom. The file sizes that OP lists indicate that the game would fit on a 4 GB Switch cart. Again bear in mind that there have been a few 3DS and many more Vita games that have launched on similar cart sizes and yet cost less than games launching on disc (on the Vita in particular, there have been games that cross launched on PS4 and yet the Vita version costed considerably less).
My hypothesis based on what I presented above is that Capcom has seen that Switch has the option to split physical games into a portion that comes on disc and a downloadable portion. In addition, they see that Nintendo is offering even cheaper physical media packages in the form of 1 GB, 2 GB, and 4 GB carts. Thus, by going with a smaller cart that contains only part of the game they can increase their profit margins. It is likely that Capcom is making more money on the Switch version by using the 1GB cart. This is not Capcom being evil, but rather a way to make more money. If Sony and MS offered a similar system to Switch, Capcom would have done a similar thing if Sony and MS offered cheaper disk packages that allowed part of the game to be downloaded.
This is not unlike what Konami did with the PC version of Metal Gear Solid V (although Capcom is not nearly as bad), where they opted to go with a DVD (as opposed to say a Blu-ray disc that could actually fit the game) that only contained an 8MB Steam installer with no trace of the game itself.
Last edited by nemo37 - on 05 May 2018
