Why do Disk Drives matter?

[Norion]

RolStoppable said:

Norion said:

Nintendo will definitely keep physical for the longest but the notion that they won't ever develop into digital only is unrealistic. Even if it takes a while Nintendo will reach the state Playstation is currently at with it and eventually where Xbox is at with it and at some point the amount of customers who are physical die-hards will be small enough to where it won't be worth catering to them.

Just compare the state of digital gaming even just a decade ago to now and it's clear that things will be very different in 20 years or so. I don't think this is a positive shift since physical is a good option to have but digital is increasingly where the money is at for video games so it's where companies like Nintendo will go.

Your logic isn't sound, because if you swapped in microtransactions - which make more money for Sony and Microsoft than software sales - for physical vs. digital, it all breaks down. Where PS and Xbox ended up is not necessarily Nintendo's destination.

It's one thing to say that digital will grow, but it's a whole nother to come to the conclusion that eventually there will be only digital. You have to remember that printruns for non-special/non-limited editions of video games have come in at the low tenthousands for decades, so the thought that Nintendo will eventually be unable to sell 100k or more physical copies of their popular IPs is plain nuts.

I think - or rather hope - that the one thing we can all agree on is that Nintendo will do whatever brings in money and is in line with the principle of not doing any long term damage to their brand reputation as a console manufacturer; this is why microtransactions are off the table for Nintendo. This will also be why there will always be physical Nintendo games, because it would be too damaging to stop printing games.

To get to the gist of the matter why do you think Nintendo would always make more money selling physical games instead of at some point forcing everyone to buy games on their consoles digitally? They make more money from selling a digital copy than a physical one so from a business perspective it seems obvious to me to eventually go in that direction when the physical die-hards get small enough in number which is why the video game industry is increasingly going there. You seem to be arguing that Nintendo will be a special exception in this regard but I just don't buy that.

Also the use of the word always shows you're not looking very far into the future with this. You said Nintendo would lose too many customers but you don't know that there will still be a significant physical video games market a few decades from now let alone 100 years from now. At some point later this century I wouldn't be surprised if some governments discourage stuff like physical video games due to them being more wasteful than the digital equivalent.