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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Gaming
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What rest? Nintendo and Microslop? They both still have "physical" media and haven't announced the end of it. Even though all first party Xbox games have solely been a "game key disc" from 2019 and on, at least they have something.
Give Xbox time and they'll no doubt announce it.
I think they've been trying for longer than Sony. They had the Xbox One S all Digital. Fittingly, the Xbox One SAD. But with Sony shooting themselves square in the dick, even 13 years removed from E3 2013, Microslop can indeed capitalize on this. They probably won't, but they could.
Nintendo is just slow walking it with key carts.
Like those NFTs that were just a link to a hosted service. It's not the ugly monkey that's encoded into a Blockchain, it's just the reference to the ugly monkey encoded into the Blockchain.
Nintendo physical carts are no longer actual games, just a licence dongle. Can't get the game anywhere? Well, can't play the game.
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.