I sure wouldn't mind getting permabanned if I lost, but I don't really think it would benefit me if i won.

I lose, permaban. You lose, You have to put your cute face in your avatar until this site goes down. Deal?

Yeah they do. People don't know what they want until they have it. If Apple listened to surveys, their entire empire wouldn't exist because "we don't own our music anymore." It wouldn't be suicide. It would be massively successful, and if any company can get away with doing it first, it's Nintendo.

And the consumer definitely benefits from is. All the innovative things that come along with the innovation that is a unified gaming platform cannot seamlessly exist without being digital. Digital dominates music. It's dominating books. It's dominating TV. It's dominating film. It's even dominating PC gaming. To think that it's too soon in 2016 for it to dominate consoles too is, very frankly, absurd.

Even if it does have poor 3rd party support, that doesn't mean that they'll intentionally make decisions to deliberately gimp further support, which is what going back to cartridges would do. They aren't making decisions by saying, "fuck it, we aren't getting support anyway."

So do I.

Discs are going bye bye. I think you're just gonna kind of have to get used to that idea. 

I don't really give a crap about discs to be honest. I don't care what format the games come on, because once I put the game on, I spend literally 0 seconds thinking about the format it's on. Nothing screams "hey remember 1997!" more than a shiny phyiscal disc these days anyway, so it's not even like "optical discs are cool man" because they sure as hell are not anymore. 

It's not like the N64 days where the games were really storage starved, today you can get a massive amount of data onto a disc, a postage stamp sized card, a flash drive, whatever and for cheap. 

You do realise that console games cost more than handheld games anyway, right? And the 3DS is old tech, now, and its cards are designed to be very small, you'd assume that they'd be able to go larger with a console system.

Realistically, a 64 GB cartridge would be sufficient for the vast majority of games. If the next console comes out in 2017, it would be about the right time for an upgrade in data space without significantly increasing costs.

And what makes you think it will "read as fast as a CD-ROM"?

I'm not talking about discs. I'm glad they're gone. I'm talking about going back to carts. Third parties would love an all digital platform. They wouldn't love paying 10x the price of discs just to port to NX, which they would be with carts. You can say what ever you want about how cheap carts are now, but the fact is they'd stil be significantly more expensive than a disk of equal size. 

Um, yeah it would significantly increase costs, compared to discs on competing platform, which is exactly what killed N64 support. Carts are not happening at all. They aren't suggested in the patent, and people are just getting antsy because the patent proves that NX will be all digital and people can't handle it.

Who says it's 10x the price of a disc? I can get 32GB SD Cards if I'm willing to order in 1000 pieces bulk for about $1 a pop. Imagine the price for Nintendo ordering 5 million of them. 

Even if it is literally 10x the cost of a disc, if a disc costs 10 cents to press, that means the cartridge you're talking about is ... $1 at a production level. 

Not exactly earth shattering. It isn't the 90s or even 2000s anymore, flash memory has indeed become dirt cheap and there are work-arounds to these situations. 

To be honest I could see some developers going with 16GB cards, which can store likely the first large chunk (several hours worth) of most games, and then the rest just downloads quietly onto the HDD. That's something you could not do in the N64 days, and this is something that's even done on the PS4/X1 all the time ... half the damn games on the system you can't even play because there's some patch or a ton of data that wasn't on the disc for what ever reason. 

The format really isn't going to decide anything. What demographics Nintendo can bring in and to what number of those they can get is ultimately what a third party is going to look at when deciding how much (if any) support will be given. 

Partial agreement and disagreement there, I don't think 2016 being too soon for complete digital is absurd. In fact, opposite is true, 2016 is absurdly soon for going complete digital... For investor perspective. No sane investor will allow Nintendo to take such expensive risk right after Wii U's failure. Not that any of the actual executives in Nintendo is going to listen to them after ignoring 4 years of endless whining from every stock holders.

Only thing that fundamentally prevents innovative idea and technology is its price, and if Steam taught us anything it is that going digital is more profitable than going physical

Yes, good internet is not available everywhere yet. But expecting nothing is going to change is more absurd, and factually wrong. (1)

Since Nintendo is openly embracing USB 3.0, it won't be too difficult to release external optical drive new console for people who still want to use physical drive. This will effectively spread out the price of console, allowing Nintendo to place console at more appealing price point.

Spemaning's analysis and evaluation isn't really too farfetched.

1. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150625145236.htm