This article is trash Kit has no authority or knowledge of what Nintendo is going to do and the way the headline is written makes seems like he does. The headline should be written “Podcaster Thinks Physical Is Here To Stay Cause He Really Hopes It Does as That’s His Preference”
Key cards are going to be pushed as hard as they can. For two reasons. It gives nintendo more control over pirates and makes carts cheaper. As production and cost of carts has plagued nintendo since the 80s.
I could see the next console having a 5/6G connection built in like kindle had just for the purpose of downloading games before they give up on key cards.
He’s a former marketing lead of Nintendo, so completely dismissing him as a “podcaster” feels not entirely fair.
He doesn’t know everything, but he’s got a pretty good idea being there for 13 years during the Wii, Wii U and Switch era
I agree with i may have been harsh it was more a reflection of the way the headline was used not a reflection of Kit. I listen to them all the time so I value his thoughts. This article was just bad journalism.
It absolutely does not make the cart cheaper. Same amount of plastic and silicon. The only exception would be the special carts that have to include more memory chips for unusually large games.
Strangely, there’s a minimum amount of memory each key cart will have, regardless of how little of it is used. At a certain point it becomes more expensive to make special chips with less memory on them. Nintendo and 3rd parties will buy the cheapest chips, which will more likely than not have enough space for the whole game regardless of whether or not the whole game gets loaded on it.
What it does do is make the cart less valuable and pretty much worthless to resellers. Destroying the aftermarket is one of Nintendo’s goals.
So from my understanding you can buy a key card play it in your switch two then turn around and hand it to me and it will just work as long as the Nintendo servers are active.
Also it does make it cheaper since you only have to store a small amount of memory for the cert a few mb at most and they can make a whole bunch of them as they are all the same. With non game cards you only have to deal with 32 GB cards or a 64 GB for bigger games so ether the game doesn’t fit or you have to use two cards.
With game key cards size doesn’t mater you could go up to 150gb and the user can just download it as long as the store stays online. It also stops game ripping with the migswitch. As the data is no longer on the card.
Please know I hate this as much as the next guy. I’m just saying nintendo doesn’t care as this has been their brass ring they been gunning for for decades.
You are thinking of the Bill of Materials cost, which is not the same as fab cost. Higher data densities absolutely do cost more to fab, and are upcharged to companies and individual consumers for profit. Nintendo has to pay more for higher density storage amounts and so do you.
But the part that went away, where you OWN A COPY INSTEAD OF A LICENSE, was the part that mattered most.
we are long past that point with all the patch/content update/dlc downloads. I don’t even remember which first party game receives no updates/patches post release.
Kinda, but I think phrasing it that way overstates how bad it is right now. Generally, you buy a physical game and you get something that’s a reasonably complete product, playable to the end without ever patching.
Basically every game has a patch, but it’s usually minor bug fixes, optimizations, or extra content that’s not so important.
Truly broken and deeply unfinished games shipping on cart/disc are (were?) still kinda the exception.
I don’t disagree with what you said and usually nintendo game has better version 1 than many other publishers that requires GBs of day 1 patch. Basically, their game is pretty broken and only past the certification to send to gold. But that’s “in the past”, I am just saying that we should not rely on past experience when comment about the current polices and trends. If nintendo is moving toward key cards, even if it’s something pushed by other publisher, we can and will see the impact of this for other platforms’ physical sales.
This is basically the 2nd round of push to pure digital and that’s nintendo’s attempt.
Truly broken and deeply unfinished games shipping on cart/disc are (were?) still kinda the exception.
DoesItPlay? tries to track this, and they currently list 92% of Switch games being playable without a download. Most of the remanining 8% are games that don’t have all the content in the cart, not games that need a patch due to bugs.
And most likely it’s higher than 92%, since it’s easier to track down the “exceptions” that require download or are broken than it is to test the thousands of available games to say “yes, I played it through using the version in the cart and it worked fine”.
The games like that are usually remasters of old games. I have some from them that don’t need updates, but they are the exception and not usually for new games.
It would help if there were guarantees you could download via Nintendo servers for X years as long as the company exists. They would never agree, but something like 40 years. Then if the company no longer exists it’s given to the community.
It’s true though, unless something crazy like that became normal, physical games have significantly more value. I do think that the average person cares more about price and convenience today vs whatever happens tomorrow.
Vote with your walllets folks.
“Fans reject Such 2 game-key cards”, do they? Impressive that they’ve managed to do that before any have even been sold. I’m always rejecting stuff I can’t have yet.
The massive negative reception could certainly be considered a “rejection”. Whether people actually stick to their guns and refuse to buy them is another story.
I will never buy a game-key card. I will stop buying new games before I buy one of those.
I hope it’s not for a long time, I hope we can hold out longer, but eventually physical games will 100% go away. It already happened to PC a long time ago, and mobile exists as a platform that never knew physical to begin with. It’s only a matter of time before that’s every platform.
