https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_10?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=32gb+micro+sd+card&sprefix=32gb+micro%2Caps%2C245&crid=JGJYO1COQVFJ&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3A32gb+micro+sd+card

Here is your source and like you see they are less than $10 even on Amazon, but when we talk about Switch carts we talking about bulks of millions bought directly from manufacturer, you have added value of box for cart, but at end all comes to that we talking about less than $10 for devs in any case. It seems that you don't realise that Switch carts are essentially same Nand memory from Micro SD card and that costs are very similar.

What the 1st tweet above is saying is that the cart cost + platform fee + packaging cost is 60% more with a 32GB cart than with 50GB Blu-Ray

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) September 8, 2017

Also onother source, on Amazon you have 50x 50GB BluRay disks for around $100, so we talking around $2 for 50GB BluRay disk.

But why is that problem for devs if we dont talk about huge amount of money!? Simple because we talking about automatically smaller margin profit, even if we talk only about $2-3 smaller profit, that's quite number if we talk about hundred of thousands sold games. So for instance if we talking about $60 game on 32GB card that sold 500k units, compared to same $60 but on 8GB that sold same number, we talking about $1-1.5m less clear profit for dev.

They trust Ninty a little more than in the past for what regards business relationships and not abusing its ownership of the platform in the competition between 1st and 3rd parties, and they like a lot the platform itself for current and predicted sales and also for the ease of development on it and the savings and synergies allowed also on SW by having portable and home console all in one device.

YouTube has a lot to do with it.

Due to the pressure of having to produce content on a daily basis, the more prominent gaming YouTubers tended to move away from games that ate all their time (among them many of the traditional AAA bestsellers) and to look for games that were quick to assimilate, either because they were short or because their length came from procedural generation and repetition. This led to the rise of the Indie on PC ... but while may of those same games were available on the main two consoles, console gamers tended to be happier with the games that fitted the old AAA paradigm: great graphics, for example.

When Switch arrived there was a big demographic that had heard about Stardew Valley, Undertale, The Binding of Isaac etc. but which hadn't really got into them because they didn't want to sit at their PC for hours retrogaming and didn't have space for those games in their couch gaming lives. Suddenly the same YouTubers who pushed Indie games were raving about the Switch as the perfect place to play what is rapidly becoming a huge number of proven critical darlings. This was the opportunity to build new libraries of Indie games on a platform flexible enough to provide new opportunities for gaming sessions.

When we talk about Nintendo's third party problems from the past, we aren't really talking about independents. Third parties were always making money on Wii, but no one cared about their successes because no serious gamer wanted to play shovelware or a clearly sub-par port of a AAA game. Switch has what are objectively the worst versions of several AAA games from this generation and they haven't (as far as I know) set the world alight in terms of sales. The old Nintendo problems are still there, but masked by the success of both the Indies and the first-party games.

So why didn't this happen for the PS Vita, which is in many ways just as good as the Switch and had a head start? I've got to think that it has to do with the fact that the Vita exclusives never drove system sales and were abandoned too quickly. Sony must be doing some pretty intense soul searching because they could have headed off Nintendo's resurgence. Of course the Vita also has a smaller screen and less comfortable controls: the form factor of the Switch is also right.

Yet another element in the success of the Switch is market sentiment. People were desperate for it to succeed: people even wanted Nintendo to kill the 3DS because they were terrified that Nintendo fans would stay on the old handheld generation and that Switch would never develop sales momentum. When the successes started coming, everyone was trumpeting them, everywhere. As confidence grew you had more Switch owners and more of them were willing to invest in developing a library on the system. Suddenly all the graphs were trending upwards.

Amazon is not Nintendo. Nintendo charge extra for custom media. It's all the same shit underneath for the most part, but creating custom media even using off the shelf parts has a cost, due to needing custom fab HW, and testing, etc. "The 60% more" than PS4/XB1 is *after* platform fees, packaging, etc. So 1.6  * N, where N is between 9-12 dollars, which is what I've read MS/Sony charges. Very out of date information, as I last read about in the PS2/OG Xbox era.

But there haven't really been many (or any) major AAA third party games that have been released brand new on the Switch with their full capabilities. You have old ports from third parties (some of which were AAA games when they came out years ago), you have smaller games from third parties (which doesn't say anything about quality, just saying they're not gonna be blockbuster sellers), you have third party games releasing late after the other systems which means the hype is gone as it is no longer a new game, and usually when you do have a big third party game come out on the Switch so far it is a sports game that has features removed when there isn't any need to remove features other than they didn't feel like doing the work on the Switch version, and besides Nintendo hasn't had a strong sports gaming community since the SNES (and even then Genesis was seen as the better console for sports).

So yeah we haven't seen amazing third party sales for AAA games because there haven't been any of those games yet (and still aren't any announced as far as I know). The third party games Switch has been getting (smaller or old/late ports or indie) are selling well, sometimes extremely well, based on their quality, with sports games selling with a lower attach rate than other systems because all big sports gamers already have a ps4 or xbox for those games. There are probably lots of third party games which have sold between 500k and 1 million when including digital, and probably a decent amount that have sold over a million with digital or only-digital. And for what Nintendo has been getting from third party support so far those are very good figures.

Look at Octopath, not even a AAA game, just a high quality retro-looking game. But it released brand new on Switch (not a late port and paired down version from some other system) and didn't they announce that had shipped + sold digital over a million in just the first four weeks? That could sell 3 million lifetime and turn-based retro-graphics jrpg isn't exactly a blockbuster selling genre. With actual brand new quality releases third parties could easily have a plethora of multi-million selling games, especially as the Switch sales climbs higher up in the tens of millions.

No its not, but we talking about same memory type, custom plastic media of that size cant make big difference in any case, and of course most of costs went at beginning for design, testing...and buy time price can be go only down. I dont talk about cost with fees, packaging, shipments...just only about difrence carts vs blu rad discs or 8GB vs 32GB, in both cases we talking about difference of few dollars.

Source? I want to believe you, but I need information.

Because they are good games in mainstream genres.

I completely agree with your post. I am not trying to knock Switch at all. I was more trying to make note that the topic at hand may be a bit premature. Octopath is exactly the type of game I championed being successful on Switch and it has proven successful for the console for all the correct reasons. I just need to see the AAA sales before I go on making guesses or assumptions over their success. Given how well Switch is selling, as long as the correct games come, the sales will follow. Like you, I absolutely believe Switch will see huge software sales so we can revisit this in a few months (after games like Daemon X Machina release next year) and hopefully have a more clear understanding of Switch and their third party sales situation.

Yeah I agree. i was just giving my two cents. I really want to see major third parties start putting full fledged AAA games out on Switch alongside their ps/box counterparts. We're not gonna know how well third party AAA games can do until that happens. At this point I think outside of sports games Switch sales would at the very least dominate Xbox despite have sold far fewer systems so far.