Why do Disk Drives matter?

[Norion]

RolStoppable said:

Norion said:

I don't think Nintendo getting rid of a physical option would cause anywhere near as big of a backlash as pursuing microtransactions. Backlash to that move would already be way smaller than it would be if done a decade ago so it's just about doing it when the backlash would be small enough to not really matter. You're right that Nintendo is relatively unique but at the end of the day they're a company so will chase after money and like the things you listed pursuing digital will make them more money.

It's positive for the consumer but for the console manufacturers digital is better so unfortunately I think it's only a matter of time till the negative impact to customer satisfaction will become low enough for Nintendo to remove the option. They can still make money from things like toys and selling special editions of their games that come with a code so I'm not saying they'll abandon selling physical items entirely. For the negative coverage part Nintendo is no stranger to doing things that piss off their fans and attract negative PR so as long as the benefit of the move outweighs that which I think it will later on they'll do it.

And I'm extrapolating based on both of those things. I think it'll make sense business wise for Nintendo to go in that direction within the next few decades and Xbox and Sony being closer to it with them having a higher digital presence is good evidence that Nintendo is only behind them in regards to it since I don't see a reason for them to not do the same unless the overall trend stops or reverses.

I'll make this really simple now. A profit-oriented business - which Nintendo absolutely is - is looking at these two options for the future:

1. Sell all their games digital-only and make a lot of money.
2. Sell their games in both physical and digital formats to make even more money.

The only way option 2 could make less sense is if there's a 100% guarantee that every former physical purchase will be forced into a digital purchase.

Why would it need to be every former physical purchase? Losing a small amount of physical purchases would be worth it to not have to deal with things like cartridges, get all the people who are indifferent to physical vs digital to only buy the latter and in general have more control over their customers. And I expect that doing this would actually create some new digital game purchases for them since if someone wanted to play a Nintendo game the option of buying a 2nd hand copy for cheaper or borrowing a physical copy from a friend wouldn't be available any more so unless they can borrow someone else's entire console or manage to pirate it they'll need to buy it directly from Nintendo to play it which would help make up for lost physical purchases.

This scenario would suck but like what happened to PC gaming I really think it's only a matter of time till console gaming follows it in this way even if it's quite a few decades away and digital only on console would be much worse compared to on PC so I would prefer to end up being wrong about this.