The other thing they could do for people who are just need to have a physical copy is let GKC games ship with a sticker for the cartridge art.
And let those people buy "blank cartridges" for $16-$25+ a pop additional (64GB-128GB). Slap the sticker on and voila, now you have a physical copy with physical packaging and you just download the data onto a blank cart and it's effectively a physical copy.
If you really must have the game on a cartridge, there you go. Pay the extra overhead, get the cartridge and transfer the data onto a cartridge. That also saves publishers having to guess like how many copies of a game they have to ship and take away the risk of ending up with a ton of deadstock copies for a $16+ cart that was already paid for.
That's the other problem with carts is you're kinda fucked as a publisher if the game doesn't sell because you have already paid for the cartridge so each unsold copy comes with a $16 penalty. With a Blu-Ray based game it's no big deal because it's only 5 cents for the disc, whoopity doo. Not the same if the disc was $16.
Nintendo did actually in the past used to sell blank cartridges for Game Boy and Super Famicom in Japan where you could take the blank cartridge into a store and download a game onto the blank cart (believe this was also done on the Famicom Disk Drive). This was the pre-internet days of high speed downloads.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 10 September 2025
