V-r0cK said:
You call Nintendo for being sentimental, Nintendo calls it the market. Switch 1 has sold a substantial amount of physical games so what makes you think its a smart idea to cut it off instantly? Because someone like you think digital-only is the future so let's just skip straight to it? There are millions out there still wanting physical, that's why Nintendo hoped Game Key Cards would be the compromise, but clearly it isn't getting the positive feedback they had hoped. Personally, I haven't hear anybody complaining about any slow speed issue with physical games these days. I play games on both physical and digital, and not once have I noticed and thought running a game on physical was slow. I think games are running fast enough as it is. Maybe it's just you and a small handful that demand everything to load instantly? Maybe you're right, Nintendo should've ripped the band aid straight and just made Switch 2 digital-only and see how it would unfold. However, since Nintendo chose to include physical media, it's their responsibility to ensure that aspect is implemented in a way that makes sense. I know our discussion won't find any common ground so I will end it here. Just circling back to the initial comment, that all of this cartridge/game key card issue is Nintendo's fault since they're the one that made the decision. That's all. |
Because "Joe Average Consumer" doesn't understand the economics of game publishing. People didn't understand in the N64 era either why the N64 wasn't getting games, you had to have a knowledge of the economics of producing cartridges vs CDs to understand what was happening.
Nintendo's fanbase (specifically the one that isn't clued in to the pricing dynamics ... so like 99.9% of the general consumer) generally hasn't had to make a choice between cartridge vs digital on Switch 1 because performance of games was relatively the same (or close enough) and Switch 1 cartridges were cheap enough that you could buy either or version with no difference.
In that case, a lot of people stayed physical because why not. If you want to sell a game you can do that, if you want to collect you can do that, and there's no real penalty for that. Also having all the data on a cartridge means you don't have to buy a larger SD Card for storage as some/most of the data is on the cartridge.
On the Playstation and XBox ecosystems meanwhile people are ditching physical in droves because they've realized there is a massive difference, the "physical" copies of PS5/XBox games these days are nothing more than just glorified keys in a way themselves. You can't really play the games off the discs themselves anymore and need to install to the SSD to play anything, and a lot of people in that case have just stopped buying physical altogether. A lot of people also realized that even if you buy physical, a lot of games have a day 1 or day 20 patch or whatever, so the whole "the whole game is on the disc!!!!" is a lie a lot of the time.
In that case many people are just saying "fuck it, I'll just buy digital, I can start playing right at midnight instead of having to wake up and go to freaking Best Buy to play tomorrow".
That is likely the same thing a "cold storage" cartridge would accomplish for Nintendo ... once people realize that a super slow but cheap cart can't actually run a game but needs to install to internal storage, once more people realize internal storage and SD Card Express is much faster, most people's interest in that style of format will likely follow what has happened on Playstation and XBox platforms.
Right now a lot of people don't understand Switch 2 is very different from Switch 1, the internal storage is quite fast, a cartridge cannot match that speed, and even to bring the cart speed up to a half reasonable level makes the cartridges fairly expensive.
