Data being on disc or cartridge matters. Millions of people don't want to hack their consoles or dump every ROM to play them when Nintendo servers die and Game Key Cards become worthless plastic.

It's not really a hard concept to understand. You may not care about it, I really don't either, I'm not against the idea of hacking my consoles or pirating games if they're not sold anymore, but I can also understand why some people are bothered by a empty cartidge without any data on them.

I can also understand why some companies don't want to eat these costs, but if even fucking Playtonic Games can sell Yooka Replaylee for $50 fully on cartridge, I can't help but laugh when much bigger companies are selling $70 game key cards lol

It's a cost that has always existed with cart-based devices. And developers/publishers always did fine and have consistently posted profit and sales records.

Carts have their strengths and weaknesses. 

They are:
* More durable. - Especially important if you have children.
* Can save data internally allowing you to bring your save game with you to other devices.
* Allows you to swap and share games seamlessly.

But obviously cost is an issue, but we are paying higher prices now anyway, so who cares? It's actually not our problem.

You forget game costs have increased by $10.
Console costs have also risen in cost.

Console manufacturers/developers/publishers have also monetized their DLC, sprinkled in Micro-transactions, increased the price of accessories and other paraphernalia, game passes and various subscriptions (Online networks etc'), added in advertising and more.

So cry me a river on that front...

As far as I am concerned, $16 is justifiable from a consumers perspective.

We are already paying a higher price.
But I am perfectly happy to pay an even higher price if I get the full game on the cart.

Otherwise, they miss out on my money entirely, how is that going to assist with them recovering their budget? It's not.

They could have also done a dual-release, one with the entire physical game on cart at a higher price, one without. Such a big issue, with such a simple solution, who would have thought?

Again, their failure to budget and plan properly doesn't constitute an emergency on my end, I'm a consumer and I will buy what I want to buy... And as it stands, that is physical media... And many other gamers feel the same way.

It's one of the tick boxes that made Cyberpunk such a roaring success on Switch 2, to the point where they had actually sold out all their carts here...

The thing about Nintendo's platforms is that there is a large cult following who only buy Physical media, 75% of Cyberpunks sales were physical on Switch 2.
https://nintendowire.com/news/2025/08/29/cd-projekt-red-reveals-75-of-cyberpunk-2077-switch-2-sales-were-physical/

On the original Switch the breakdown was like 50/50 Physical/Digital ratio... That's a big market to alienate and lose sales on.
https://famiboards.com/threads/switch-packaged-games%E2%80%99-physical-to-digital-sales-ratio-was-2-1-in-fy24.11617/

Collectors are a big market.
Limited Run Games has built it's entire business model on it.

Steam is full of a collectors, the Median of unplayed games in peoples Steam Library is at 51.5%, which is massive considering the 132+ million active monthly users.
https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-many-pc-games-get-bought-but

Retro game cart collecting is currently around a 12~ billion dollar market.
https://gam3s.gg/news/exploring-142-billion-gaming-collectibles-market/

Game collectors aren't a demographic that should be ignored, maybe if Ubisoft recognized that with StarWars Outlaws, they might have had better success... But delaying the launch on PC/Steam, then not releasing the game properly on Physical media didn't do them any favours. (Plus it's Ubisoft. So meh.)

I would not be against this as an option.

But if they are going to lump full-game cart copies as a higher price tier, then Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and the entire gaming industry need to lower their digital prices back down to $60 USD.

Otherwise it's stupid greed.

AMD doesn't really have competition in that marketspace...

Intel Decelerator graphics are the only alternative since all other manufacturers exited the market, including nVidia.
Part of that was Intel and AMD bringing their Northbridge on-die, reducing the need for 3rd party alternatives.

I think the lockstep of AMD's integrated graphics being 6-12 months behind their desktop variants will continue, AMD developers for the PC Discreet first, then filters that technology down to all other segments. I.E. Integrated, Consoles, Compute/Professional uses etc'.

I mean, we still see RDNA2 still being pushed around in new products... Rather than RDNA3 or RDNA3.5... And even AMD's Vega is still being sold, despite it no longer receiving reliable driver support with AMD's Ryzen 7430 for instance.

AMD has made a mess out of it's lineup, especially in the mobile space.

The other thing they could do for people who are just need to have a physical copy is let GKC games ship with a sticker for the cartridge art.

And let those people buy "blank cartridges" for $16-$25+ a pop additional (64GB-128GB). Slap the sticker on and voila, now you have a physical copy with physical packaging and you just download the data onto a blank cart and it's effectively a physical copy.

If you really must have the game on a cartridge, there you go. Pay the extra overhead, get the cartridge and transfer the data onto a cartridge. That also saves publishers having to guess like how many copies of a game they have to ship and take away the risk of ending up with a ton of deadstock copies for a $16+ cart that was already paid for.

That's the other problem with carts is you're kinda fucked as a publisher if the game doesn't sell because you have already paid for the cartridge so each unsold copy comes with a $16 penalty. With a Blu-Ray based game it's no big deal because it's only 5 cents for the disc, whoopity doo. Not the same if the disc was $16.

Nintendo did actually in the past used to sell blank cartridges for Game Boy and Super Famicom in Japan where you could take the blank cartridge into a store and download a game onto the blank cart (believe this was also done on the Famicom Disk Drive). This was the pre-internet days of high speed downloads. 

Or they could've make that gamecard port compatible with U3 SD Cards as well, which, for 32GB, in quantities that games ship, go for ~$1-2...if that.

U3 is rated at minimum of 30MB/s read speed. Know what else is rated at ~30MB/s? PS5 BluRay. So in that alternative timeline, you could've had 2 physical options - one that is equivalent of CD/BD, which is slow, so you need to install game on internal storage, and one that is equivalent of cartridge, which is plug and play. Appropriate pricing, of course, so take your pick.

30MB is laughably slow these days, even the Switch 2 carts are very slow but at least they're 400MB/sec or so apparently (internal Switch 2 storage can go up to 2100MB/sec, SD Express cards 850-1000MB/sec).

I mean at some point too the whole thing becomes so ridiculously convoluted that I think you would begin to realize as a physical copy shopper that you're jumping through a bunch of hoops to get the worst version of the game. 

The other problem with this whole thing is 64GB was never going to be anywhere near enough for the Switch 2's product cycle anyway. Now that we know it can run a fair bit of current gen games, you're going to need 128GB and probably even 192GB carts. 

Cartridges are just becoming too impractical. Frankly as a format they sucked in the 80s and 90s too mainly because of cost and lack of space too. 

It is slow, though most of those cards go faster (30MB/s is minimum) - and that's why it's cheap. As I said, PS5's BD reads at around 30MB/s - and PS5 games are much bigger than games on Switch 2, yet people tend to buy them and install them. And, lo and behold, it seems that PS6 will have BD...again. So they are not ditching physical.

128GB in that quantities would go for $4-5, at most.

For many people, giving those few extra dollars for having something that they actually own and can store would be non-issue.

Star Outlaws Size went from 50GB on PS5 to 20GB on Switch2. endless levels of compression is forever available to every single developer out there when push comes to shove...  there will never be a 128GB Switch game. Mark my words. Give developers space and they will fill it up. Create reasonable limitations and they will work within it. 

Any game that is above 100GB on PS5 is that size out choice of the developer pushing for highest quality, video assets, audio and textures. All of this can always be cut down whilst maintaing the core experience. 

Some devs will optimize but a lot of devs won't and especially for games that have to release day and date and aren't like 6-12 month old ports. 

The truth is Nintendo is not exactly the center of the 3rd party universe, other platforms are, so you have to basically hope that they will put in all this extra effort for a cartridge when they probably will not be willing to do that in many cases. 

The PS6 Portable or whatever it is probably will be digital only. 

I was shocked at how much better looking TotK is over BotW. I played TotK years after BotW, but with the upgrades I played them back-to-back. Currently working through TotK now. The volumetric and shadows are massive upgrades over BotW, quite a stunning game.

Yeah BOTW was a Wii U game and it shows.

The Switch wasn't a big leap over Wii U, but it was a bit better, enough for the games to show it.