Topic: Theory: The Switch successor will be all-digital.

If Nintendo were an American company which tend to cut costs wherever it can regardless, then I would be practically certain the next Switch would at the very least have a digital only sku (which I wouldn't buy.) As it is, nah, physical media is still doing the business in it's native homeland (and abroad too I might add.)

If it is I will pass. I don't mind having digital but giving the companies total control on what they sell and how long no thank you.

No physical means no buy for me. I've left gaming before and I will have no problem doing it again. I have enough Switch games to last me until the next time the Game Industry removes its head from its posterior. Already skipped the N64, GC, and WiiU Eras in their entirety on consoles. What's another one?

Look at the way Nintendo iterates between hardware generations. The Wii U was basically 3 GameCubes with an HDMI-out socket. No way is Nintendo going to jump to chasing the 4k bus as hard as that.

What's the average size of a Nintendo game this gen? I'm guessing 8gb, if that, so no way would the next Mario game require >64gb. Even if the next Zelda outputs at 4k, that DLSS stuff will reduce file sizes required and it won't be >64gb.

Now sure, I could see them copying the western twins and offering a digital-only version, but I'm guessing it would sell about as well as the Lite does now.

That would be ****ing dumb, end of statement.

I support this statement

No physical is shooting themselves in the foot. Physical is what allows consumer choice and considering popular games cost as much as physical and when you get tired off it you sell it to get benefits back. Physical give the consumers freedom of which Switch they play.

@Magician
As I said, storage isn't getting more expensive. I mean quite litterally I spelt this out

In any case, with flash being about the only thing on the planet that's actually getting cheaper? I don't think storage is going to be much of a limitation on Nintendo's next hardware

And Mask ROM? It plays by the same rules as flash. It's just generally cheaper because it's not writable

@Rambler
The proprietary nature of it isn't what makes the cost floor higher than discs. It's the fact that a disc is a few layers of plastic and metal sandwiched together. A cartridge is an IC soldered to a circuit that has contacts and is contained in a plastic housing. A disc is a thing, a cartridge is a device with components that needs to be assembled

But that's not really the cost that anyone really cares about because you can absorb a couple of dollars when you're selling a $60US product. There are two costs that have mattered here since the start and they remain the two costs. For optical media it is the cost of the drive, for cartridges it is the cost of capacity. Both capacity and especially optical drives can run into the $10s and historically the drives ran into the $100s

Here's the thing, the cost of an optical drive? There's a floor to that and we've well and truly reached it. Optical drives are no-longer getting cheaper. Which is why Sony and Microsoft are releasing digital only SKUs. Capacity? Cartridges have become bigger faster than discs have. The CD launched in 1982 @ 700MB and the largest BluRay launched in 2016 @ 100GB, ~140x in 34 years. Switch cartridges are 1-64GB, DS cartridges were 8-512MB. Similar difference, that took ~13 years. Which is why the Switch is relatively competitive on capacity in a way that the N64 was not

For the graph. Small = smallest capacity, large = largest capacity. The other lines are exponential trend lines which appear straight because it's a log scale. If you look at the scale every major line on there is 10x

Yeaaaah if it’s digital only nintnedo has truly lost there **** and I don’t even think the fans will help them this time, the amount of people who collect will leave, those 99 dollar deluxe physical editions they love selling won’t work anymore, because who the heck would do that for a property you don’t even really own, heck naw.

Yeah, no chance in heck this is happening, even by some slim chance that the successor releases as late as 2025.

Side note, I remember making a post on here about this same discussion way back when people were speculating about the Wii HD/Project Cafe. That long ago. I distinctly remember my take on it way back in like 2011

IIRC it was my firm belief that in the medium term so like, 2015-2020 or so, cartridges would become a viable way to store games again. And not just for portables, just generally. Which was too late for Nintendo's "Wii HD" but could potentially be viable for whatever came next. My huge question mark over that thought? Swapping to cartridges kills BC and by the time 2020 came along it'll be viable to be digital only anyways. Which is the path Sony and Microsoft have taken. Nintendo took the cartridge path and I suspect will stay on it for BC

I scrolled through my old posts to find it but can't be bothered. It's in there somewhere. Although I did find a comment from 2009 where I'm arguing the case for Nintendo's "next portable" to copy the architecture of the Wii for their next portable so they don't have to duplicate development. Which did eventually happen. So I'm not a complete idiot

edit: found some of them, seems I may have jumped the gun on it just a tad:

The other thing to remember is that retailers make very little from selling actual physical consoles - they want to sell the games (since this is regular repeat business). If you remove the physical games you remove a huge incentive for retailers to stock and promote your products.

Why should - for instance - Amazon bother too much about stocking and selling a console when all of the subsequent (really interesting) profits are in the eShop and Amazon can't touch them at all? They might still sell it but far less enthusiastically. These partnerships matter hugely (as Nintendo found with Wii U) and ditching physical media is a kick in the teeth to them.

For the most hardcore gamers this doesn't matter - you retain the same reach with those customers because they will hunt down ways to buy your console - but even slightly more casual players it can create issues. It also affects different markets in very different ways depending on the retail and distribution channels that exist there.

As far as I am aware, the existence of 64GB carts is purely speculative and was never officially addressed. Are there any 64GB releases at present?

@skywake - good point on the technology, hadn't thought of that.
I would still argue that there is a cost inherent in it being a proprietary item - R&D, and also the number of places that have the equipment to manufacture something like this. An optical disk has been around for a long time, so all the initial costs have been recouped, and there will be multiple places that have the equipment to make them.

Not a fan of that graph, so apologies if it is your own. Those trend lines are not really needed as such as the exponent component of the graph doesn't really tell us what capacity will be in the future. Plus all the consoles (a proxy for time) seem evenly spaced.
Not sure if the smallest capacity Switch cart is 1gb? Might be my memory being bad.

One way of doing it would be cost Vs size, then seeing if it came out in chronological order, which you would think it would.

@StuTwo there is still money to be made for retailers with a digital only console, especially online ones, with controllers and other peripherals.

@MarioBrickLayer
Peripherals are pretty finite. A couple.of controllers per console? Maybe four at the most? Fewer than the number of games for that console.

@Rambler You're right that retailers won't make as much if they don't have games to sell, but they won't be involved in the decision! The Switch has sold 111m units, so I would have thought 200m+ additional controllers could have been sold?

Anecdotally, the capacities are 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB. I strongly doubt that anybody would still be manufacturing storage devices under 1GB in this day and age (other than CDs).

There were some murmurs about 64GB cartridges, but I'm not aware of any such releases, especially as most publishers (Nintendo included) shy away from 32GB cartridges as it is.

It is my graph and I think you're being needlessly nitpicky for a quick and dirty graph knocked up to dunk on dumb point someone is trying to make. I only added the trendline to give somewhat of a rough idea of where we could be going next. There is exponential growth in this space, you can't make judgements on where things will go next based on where things were at in 2017. The graph illustrates that well enough

Also yes, you're technically correct to say the data points should be tied to time rather than console generation. However console generation is more easily digestible and the console generations are relatively evenly spaced anyways (GBC - 4yrs-> GBA -3yrs-> DS -5yrs-> 3DS -6yrs-> Switch -5yrs-> now). So much of a muchness, it's the other axis where most of the movement is happening

@MarioBrickLayer
Most people will have more than two games while a few (a lot) will only have the joycons. So I would imagine that 200m+ peripheral sales is optimistic. However, I cant find any data on pro controller sales, so happy to be corrected

@Silly_G - honestly thought 4gb was the smallest. Things you learn.