Not wanting to lose $16 of your profit margin is not "anti-consumer". That can be likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of the profit margin, asking companies to take a 40% hit on Switch 2 versions of games is ridiculous.
No business anywhere would be OK with that.
Cartridges suck and always have sucked when they get expensive and there's no way around that. Happened in the 80s (when Nintendo came damn close to ditching carts for disks hence the Famicom Disk Drive) and happened again in the 90s (the N64 debacle which handed Playstation the entire home console market on a silver platter).
CD Projeckt Red doing it for one game doesn't prove anything, that game is heavily discounted on other platforms, at $70 relative to other platforms even with a cartridge they likely still come out ahead. It is a 4 years old game and already turned a profit likely years ago anything they sell from this point on is gravy. That is not comparable to games like Star Wars Outlaws where the game is probably still hasn't broken even or new game releases like Borderlands 4 which need to recoup their development budget of years of work.
Cartridges in the long term were never going to be a viable format for a Switch hybrid *console*. The fact is the Switch was eventually going to have to increase format speed and adopt faster internal storage like other consoles have. To do that and have higher capacity cartridges that can store today's modern game releases that are huge (quite often 90GB+) it always meant the cartridge medium was going to be pushed into expensive territory. If Nintendo was making some 4DS platform with junk ass specs and a $200 price point, OK, cartridges with storage of 16-32GB at super slow speeds would be A-OK. But that's not the product that the Switch 2 is, it's a modern game console that can run even modern 3rd party games. There isn't a cartridge format well suited to that and optical discs are a non-starter on a mobile device.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 16 September 2025
