Iraís Reyes is one of the few Mexican lawmakers on the side of gamers, joining hands with Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio to file a complaint against Sony with Mexico’s antitrust authority: the…
Some games are still released with a proper full cartridge, but the key cards are chosen increasingly frequently by devs. I’ve heard the I/O bandwidth on the cartridges is just not enough for modern games with huge files, so they deliberately choose the key cards to force players to play off the faster internal storage. At first, I found it befuddling that Nintendo wouldn’t do something about that before the hardware got finalized, but now, in light of Sony pushing full digital, I suspect it was a deliberate choice to start prepping customers for a strictly digital future.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a factor at all, but I’m pretty sure the I/O capacity is a factor, too. I want to say load times were unacceptably high, at least in their eyes. Games with loading screens might suffer through it, but many games try to load content on the fly in the background from my understanding, and the memory cards can’t keep things smooth and hidden.
Sure but disks are slower than flash memory and disk based systems have been ‘installing’ from media for decades. They could just install to local storage from the card if they wanted it to be fast.
Sure, but that’s when the cost factor you mentioned come in. If players can’t even run off the card, why spend the money on it? And so we get key cards.
But why should the publisher spend the money on it? They can’t really increase the price just for that since many games already push what the market will tolerate for a single game, and even if they’re below that price threshold, not many gamers will tolerate paying a premium for the physical media that has been standard for so long. I understand why we as consumers want physical media, but from a business perspective, particularly the suits’ perspective, it’s just a waste of perfectly good money.
Some games are still released with a proper full cartridge, but the key cards are chosen increasingly frequently by devs. I’ve heard the I/O bandwidth on the cartridges is just not enough for modern games with huge files, so they deliberately choose the key cards to force players to play off the faster internal storage. At first, I found it befuddling that Nintendo wouldn’t do something about that before the hardware got finalized, but now, in light of Sony pushing full digital, I suspect it was a deliberate choice to start prepping customers for a strictly digital future.
The actual reason is that the flash storage is expensive.
I’m sure the dev gets a bigger cut if the cart is cheaper
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a factor at all, but I’m pretty sure the I/O capacity is a factor, too. I want to say load times were unacceptably high, at least in their eyes. Games with loading screens might suffer through it, but many games try to load content on the fly in the background from my understanding, and the memory cards can’t keep things smooth and hidden.
Sure but disks are slower than flash memory and disk based systems have been ‘installing’ from media for decades. They could just install to local storage from the card if they wanted it to be fast.
Sure, but that’s when the cost factor you mentioned come in. If players can’t even run off the card, why spend the money on it? And so we get key cards.
So you can actually ‘own’ the game. Right now if you have the key card but Nintendo is inaccessible you don’t actually have a game you have ewaste
But why should the publisher spend the money on it? They can’t really increase the price just for that since many games already push what the market will tolerate for a single game, and even if they’re below that price threshold, not many gamers will tolerate paying a premium for the physical media that has been standard for so long. I understand why we as consumers want physical media, but from a business perspective, particularly the suits’ perspective, it’s just a waste of perfectly good money.