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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Prediction: "Cartridges" will return for the Nintendo home console

AZWification on 22 August 2015
zorg1000 said:
AZWification said:

Everyone should hail Lord Rol and his awesome predictions.


Myself and others had been saying this well before Rol made this thread.

I wasn't aware. Hail everyone who said this well before Rol did!



                
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asqarkabab on 22 August 2015

Hope it returns so piracy will be nonexistent on nx



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slab_of_bacon on 24 August 2015

It would be awesome to get cartridges back.



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melbye on 24 August 2015

Something like Famicom Disc System could be interesting



potato_hamster on 24 August 2015

If in the next home console is cartridge-based, while it may be similar to an SD card it will not be anywhere close to a "standard SD card" that would be used in cameras, media players etc. for one main reason: piracy. If you could read a Nintendo game cartridge using a standard port on your computer, creating new copies of that game would be absolutely trivial to the right person.

"Now why would this matter? Of course it's not going to be an SD card with extra read/write protection! It will have to be unique and not something pretty much any device you own can read" You might say. Well there's that cost thing everyone keeps talking about. SD cards are super cheap because they are producing millions of cards that can be read by pretty much any device. Add extra security or a unique shape, and guess what you have? The PS Vita memory card. How about how palatable the consumer base found dishing out $100 for a 32 GB memory card when the 32 GB SD sitting on a shelf 50 feet away was $15? They felt robbed. Now I know using such a card as a game cartridge rather than a memory cartridge means a much higher volume, which would drive costs down, but it only costs around $5 to press a blu-ray. Cartridges would definitely be more expensive than that.



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potato_hamster on 24 August 2015
RolStoppable said:
potato_hamster said:

If in the next home console is cartridge-based, while it may be similar to an SD card it will not be anywhere close to a "standard SD card" that would be used in cameras, media players etc. for one main reason: piracy. If you could read a Nintendo game cartridge using a standard port on your computer, creating new copies of that game would be absolutely trivial to the right person.

"Now why would this matter? Of course it's not going to be an SD card with extra read/write protection! It will have to be unique and not something pretty much any device you own can read" You might say. Well there's that cost thing everyone keeps talking about. SD cards are super cheap because they are producing millions of cards that can be read by pretty much any device. Add extra security or a unique shape, and guess what you have? The PS Vita memory card. How about how palatable the consumer base found dishing out $100 for a 32 GB memory card when the 32 GB SD sitting on a shelf 50 feet away was $15? They felt robbed. Now I know using such a card as a game cartridge rather than a memory cartridge means a much higher volume, which would drive costs down, but it only costs around $5 to press a blu-ray. Cartridges would definitely be more expensive than that.

The 3DS uses uniquely shaped game cards and nobody has had any issues with them.

Yes of course. If Nintendo does go to a cartridge-based solution, it will be more like a 3DS cart in terms of execution - all i'm saying is won't be a variant of an SD card. It appears my second paragraph never came off the way I intended it to - it makes it sound like any cartridge solution would be impractical. This obviously isn't true, especially if these cartridges are read-only.



setsunatenshi on 24 August 2015
RolStoppable said:
potato_hamster said:

If in the next home console is cartridge-based, while it may be similar to an SD card it will not be anywhere close to a "standard SD card" that would be used in cameras, media players etc. for one main reason: piracy. If you could read a Nintendo game cartridge using a standard port on your computer, creating new copies of that game would be absolutely trivial to the right person.

"Now why would this matter? Of course it's not going to be an SD card with extra read/write protection! It will have to be unique and not something pretty much any device you own can read" You might say. Well there's that cost thing everyone keeps talking about. SD cards are super cheap because they are producing millions of cards that can be read by pretty much any device. Add extra security or a unique shape, and guess what you have? The PS Vita memory card. How about how palatable the consumer base found dishing out $100 for a 32 GB memory card when the 32 GB SD sitting on a shelf 50 feet away was $15? They felt robbed. Now I know using such a card as a game cartridge rather than a memory cartridge means a much higher volume, which would drive costs down, but it only costs around $5 to press a blu-ray. Cartridges would definitely be more expensive than that.

The 3DS uses uniquely shaped game cards and nobody has had any issues with them.


what size are those 3ds cards? there's your answer :)



zorg1000 on 24 August 2015
setsunatenshi said:
RolStoppable said:

The 3DS uses uniquely shaped game cards and nobody has had any issues with them.


what size are those 3ds cards? there's your answer :)


GBA-up to 32mb

DS-up to 512mb

3DS-up to 8gb

the maximum cartridge capacity has multiplied by 16 each generation, if next generation repeats than 128gb could be the limit, with 32/64gb being more common.



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setsunatenshi on 25 August 2015
RolStoppable said:
setsunatenshi said:

what size are those 3ds cards? there's your answer :)

Up to 8GB in size, but most games use sizes of 2GB or below. Storage capacity has increased considerably in the last five years, so that isn't an issue. Naturally, higher capacities come at a higher cost, but the advantage of the medium is that it isn't a problem to produce cards of varying capacities.


it's prohibitively expensive to replace discs with cards when you start getting games that are 50 GB and more. if it was a good idea, why wouldn't Nintendo use them on the Wii U?

it's so inexpensive to print discs, plus as time goes by the blu-ray players only keep dropping in price, so it should be cheaper to include one on the next console than in the current one.

the prices of games would necessarily go up and the consumer would eat the cost. last time they tried this was during the N64 era and we all saw how it went.

i don't think Nintendo would be stupid enough to do this. it would be way smarter to release a digital only wii u without the optical drive and introduce it as a 2nd sku in the market at a lower price just for people who want to get their games digitally but aren't interested in paying the 300€/$ for it.



setsunatenshi on 25 August 2015
RolStoppable said:
setsunatenshi said:

it's prohibitively expensive to replace discs with cards when you start getting games that are 50 GB and more. if it was a good idea, why wouldn't Nintendo use them on the Wii U?

it's so inexpensive to print discs, plus as time goes by the blu-ray players only keep dropping in price, so it should be cheaper to include one on the next console than in the current one.

the prices of games would necessarily go up and the consumer would eat the cost. last time they tried this was during the N64 era and we all saw how it went.

i don't think Nintendo would be stupid enough to do this. it would be way smarter to release a digital only wii u without the optical drive and introduce it as a 2nd sku in the market at a lower price just for people who want to get their games digitally but aren't interested in paying the 300€/$ for it.

When the Wii U was conceived, prices for SD cards above 8GB were still expensive. The situation has changed dramatically since then. It's getting to the point where the difference in price between Blu-ray and cards is going to be negligible for similar sizes of storage capacity, but cards have the advantage of higher read speeds and higher reliability (consoles with optical drives break down far more often). So consumers wouldn't have to pay more games and therefore the situation isn't even remotely comparable to the Nintendo 64.

As for a digital-only Wii U, the idea is worthless. While Nintendo might save $30 on the production of the console, they would still have to maintain the same retail price, if not raise it. No savings for consumers on the system, because retailers would demand a higher profit margin on a piece of hardware who they could sell no software for. The PSP Go was such a digital-only system and it's price was actually higher than the PSP which played physical media, because otherwise retailers wouldn't have carried it at all.


I don't believe the first part (regarding the costs on the cards), I would need to see data to change my mind.

On your second point, It's true that it would be a mess to retail a product without physical media to be sold. I do think they could test the waters by releasing some limited edition on amazon or other such online retailers. But also Nintendo seems to have the weakest online infrastructure so that would be a whole other can of worms to resolve.

Basically I think this patent doesn't actually represent a product that will be released ultimately. At least not as everyone seems to be assuming (no optical drive)