Why do Disk Drives matter?

[RolStoppable]

Norion said:

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.

Nintendo is already a special exception for many things. You acknowledged this in silence when it comes to microtransactions. You could just as well argue that microtransactions make more money than foregoing to do the practice, but that brings us to the question why Nintendo isn't pursuing the path. Which is something that I already answered in the preceding post: It's bound to hurt Nintendo in the long run. This long term thinking is also something that makes Nintendo a special exception. An example of this is the pricing for their games where they didn't follow the AAA industry model of slashing prices quickly to maximize the amount of copies being sold; Nintendo's reasoning was that this devalues games and of course they were right in refusing to cut prices because it has benefited their profits for generations.

Other major examples of Nintendo being the special exception are:

Nintendo is still making portable consoles.
Nintendo doesn't port their games to the PC or other consoles.
Nintendo still greenlights games in genres that the AAA industry has long abandoned.

The puzzling thing is that you say that physical copies are a positive thing, but at the same time believe that Nintendo will get rid of them. Why is that? The evidence is already out there that Nintendo doesn't chase the quick buck, so customer satisfaction is verifiably built in to their long term business strategy. Why would Nintendo piss off video game collectors and all the passionate gamers with YouTube channels who sit in front of their shelves that are stacked with physical video games? It makes no sense to turn positive coverage of your products into negative coverage that is viewed by millions of people.

As for the look into the future, I am looking just as far into it as you do. The difference is that I extrapolate the future from the facts of how Nintendo does business while you use Sony and Microsoft as your basis.