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Soundwave on 26 September 2025
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V-r0cK said:
Soundwave said:

It's not about playing nice. The cartridges are just fucking expensive. That's nobody's fault, it's just a reality of why cartridges are a shitty format in general. When they get expensive, it becomes problematic, always has been, always will be, this goes back to the 1980s. 

The Switch 3 probably won't even have physical media period, so good luck with that. 

The only thing cartridges ever really had going for them was they used to be significantly faster of a format than discs, but since playing games off discs is no longer a standard at all, cartridges are now basically the slowest format on the market, on top of being the most expensive way to distribute games. It has basically nothing going for it. 

I don't even buy that there's some big preservation angle here, the data on a cartridge is going to be exactly the same as data on internal storage or on an SD Card. 

No, ultimately it's actually Nintendo's fault. 

If Nintendo wanted a cheaper route they could've opt for some SD/micro SD format when they knew the cost of cartridges would be high. But nope...

Nintendo is the one that decided on which cartridge to use for the Switch 2, Nintendo is the one that decided what size the cartridge should be and only give one option of size (whereas the Switch 1 came in different sizes at least), Nintendo is also the one in charge of production of the cartridges where devs and publishers must purchase these cartridges from Nintendo as well. Sucks that for an expensive cartridge it can barely fit a decent 3rd party game.

You think Nintendo just randomly chose these cartridges and didn't think this wasn't going to be an issue for developers? Of course they did, that's why they came up with "Game Key Cards".  

Who knows, may be this is also Nintendo's secret agenda to push devs away from cartridges to just putting their games online so Nintendo will have an even tighter hold on controlling the games on there.

You saying "it's nobody's fault" is like saying it wasn't Sony's fault that their Vita memory cards were so expensive. Like of course it was Sony's fault, they chose to use that specific card rather than finding a cheaper alternative.

It's Nintendo fault for being sentimental. They should have just not bothered with this whole farce to begin with and ripped the band aid straight off ... digital only, like every other modern portable platform is. That Playstation 6 portable, whatever it is will be digital only too, so will Steam Decks and XBox Portables and whatever else. And you know what? No one will complain one iota about that. 

Having some kind of even slower format that would be cheaper just would've lead to complaining as well as some people would not understand why the main cartridge is so slow and why they can't run games off the cartridge directly and then Nintendo would be blasted for making essentially useless cartridges by a bunch of people. There's no winning in this, the best thing to do would have been to not even bother playing this game to begin with. 

Cartridges are woefully inadequate as a format these days, just to get even 64GB at a crappy ass speed still costs $16/cartridge, they shouldn't have even bothered but they likely were hoping to use this generation as a transition phase before going all digital with the next Nintendo system and ease into it. Instead they probably should have just realized there's no pleasing some people and made the transition now and gotten the inevitable over with. 

Maybe even breaking from retail cleanly would have allowed lower game prices across the board since some portion of your sales no longer have a retailer + cost of physical taking $15-$20 off the top of your margin. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 26 September 2025