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

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?

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

@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

Pardon my ignorance, but what is 'IC' here?

Again, this is anecdotal, but apparently 8GB is the default (and costs about the same per unit as a 25GB Blu-ray disc for publishers), with publishers saving more money with lower capacity cartridges.

There are plenty of games out there that fall under 1GB, so it makes sense to continue to offer cartridges in that size.

@gcunit
IC = Integrated Circuit. Long description, instead of building a circuit out of individual components like transistors you take a slice is silicon and make some have less electrons and other bits have more. Which allows you to make super tiny transistors in one integrated package

Short story, this is what's inside a Switch cartridge:
https://i.imgur.com/5PFpEgV.jpg
The black thing is the IC

As a side note to this discussion it's worth remembering why game sizes had become large. Prior to the PS5/XBox Series games were built under the assumption that you'd have an optical drive and a mechanical hard drive. The largest games on the PS4/XBOne were as large as they were because they had duplicated assets in order to get around the fact that HDDs have decent sequential but slow random read speeds. The Switch uses solid state storage, random read performance is not an issue

Then on the PS5/XBox Series we're entering into a new age. All of a sudden storage is SUPER fast which means your bottleneck is no longer the storage but the compression you put on it. So assets are not compressed, you read directly from the disk into VRAM. Which adds up considerably especially when your assets are designed for running at 4K natively. Just quietly, I think it's unlikely Nintendo's next hardware will have a 1TB Gen 4 NVMe SSD and I doubt its largest games will run at 4K

I think the most likely scenario? When the next generation starts 32GB is on the new hardware what 8GB is for the Switch. 64GB will be relatively common but higher capacities will be an option. However, with the spec they're targeting I doubt there will be many games that require more than 64GB. The ones that will will be the same sorts of games that push that limit on the Switch, mostly compilations

The only way this would make any sense is if the Game Card port of the Switch (and a design for its successor) costs enough to be worth removing. And I'm going to imagine it doesn't. Optical drives are a different beast that save Sony and Microsoft some money when they are not included in their consoles. Not to mention they free up a little space in the dimensions of the console.
You also have to consider consumer preferences. Nintendo is the most relevant console maker in Japan right now, and Japanese consumers tend to like physical media more than the USA or other markets.
Japan and some European markets are also much more cash-heavy societies than the USA. What makes more sense: buying a physical game with cash or buying eShop cards with cash to buy games that are available physically? The answer is pretty obvious.