RolStoppable said:
Correct, game cards cost money. But that's the only thing you got right. Switch 2 game prices have been increased by $10 which in turn covers the higher costs for the production of game cards, so there's no subsidy necessary in the first place. You should be ashamed of yourself for serving as a corporate shill by instantly putting the blame on consumers when the actual guilty party can be so easily identified. It's the third parties who choose game-key cards instead of game cards. Your argument that Mario Kart World causes a decrease in third party sales is wrong as well. MKW sells the hardware, so its existence is beneficial for all games. The disposable income argument is flawed too. We won't see any Nintendo game suffer because a large amount of people has supposedly not enough money to afford video games. That's because physical copies have a higher value than digital games. After Nintendo made a survey about game-key cards in Japan, they issued another one for America. It's evident that game-key card games have underperformed. Deservedly so, because it's third parties who'll have to learn the hard way that people want physical games. Your earlier hypothesis that the absence of a physical copy will translate to a digital sale has been quickly proven to be the bullshit it was and is. |
3rd party games are cheaper than Nintendo's physical copy games in many respects, I paid significantly less for Street Fighter VI than I did for Donkey Kong Bananza, if the game had to come physical on cartridge as part of a dumb mandate, that may not have been the case.
3rd parties are not going to subsidize the $10 extra cost, they need that extra margin as is because development costs have skyrocketed. The extra cost for the cartridge will be ON TOP of that additional $10 that goes to cover game development (and will be standard on Playstation and XBox as well).
Again these are valid realities, these are not just made up shit.
The higher speed cartridges push the cost of cartridges higher, then you have tariff bullshit on top of that.
Then not only that, 64GB is not enough space for a lot 3rd party games to begin with. I don't want a fucking compromised experience because some 40-year-old game collector needs to live in 1996 forever for the sake of "tradition". Key Cards lets developers just set their game size to whatever they need without a fuss. 128GB cartridges are likely not happening any time soon and if they ever do it will likely be in very limited quantities.
EDIT: "$10 extra" also may be generous, there are reports floating around that 64GB Switch 2 cartridges cost $16 for the cartridge only.
That's a substantial cost. If people want this option so bad, then pay the extra $16 per game for it, why should a developer who's already operating on thin margins eat a $16 surcharge per copy on Switch 2 versus other platforms.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 05 August 2025
