What's cool with this kind of thread is that you can quickly see who's not reading anything before posting.
It's not the MAXIMUM size, just like you can put multiples blu-ray in a disc for bigger games, you can use cartridges with more size for the bigger games. 3DS used that. DS used that. N64 used that. It's nothing new for Nintendo.
And this doesn't mean anything for the third party.
If this is true then the starting, most common (ie. cheapest), size blu-ray is a full DVD size bigger than this "standard card size" and blu-rays are made in large quantities so they are probably cheaper to print.
How does it not mean
anything for third parties? It's certainly more work getting a multiplatform game's size down that fits on DL blu-rays
on both competing systems already when it comes to deciding if they were to do a port or when considering making a really large game for the Switch. Even a double-sized game card at 32GB would not be enough to equal a DL blu-ray, a supposed dev/publisher would need to go up to the third level card for 64GB.
How much more expensive will that be for the publisher to go up two levels in game cards? I doubt Nintendo does it for free.
I mean that's great and all that technically it can use bigger cards, but this is supposed to be half console. Once you get passed indies a lot of bigger devs these days go pretty big (in addition people also want JRPGs to include dual-audio so that's double the audio data) and getting bigger. And like all media, it obviously won't be a full 16 available either so it'll be a little less than that before devs even start filling it. Some games still use video cutscenes (1080p maybe 4K in a year or two with Pro/Scorpio patches), even the audio files will probably have to be more compressed if we're talking bigger games like the next "Xenoblade". That may not really a problem for the stereo portable side of the system but what about the plugged in side where people would like surround sound?
Not that this will prevent great games from being made or anything particularly by first parties and some co-productions will probably get discounts on bigger game cards or something.
all thoses people forgetting the slow inegal speed of optic media imply data replication.
I believe that was more because third party devs were building their games for both PS3 and 360 so third parties took the shortcut of apparently doubling some of the data to speed up load times even though technically the PS3's BD drive was faster being constant read, since it was easier to do since blu-rays are 25GB while DL DVDs were just 8.5GB.
I doubt they really do this as often anymore since both the PS4 and Xbone use the same discs, not to mention both now have standard hard drives and full installs.
But will this be like 3DS, where very FEW publishers and developers opt for larger sizes because cost?
Remember RE Revelations used a larger card and was going to have a premium because of it? Of course Capcom backed off, but in the time since - very few games have used larger cards to push more assets for games.
I fear most will just put what they can, into the smaller cards and call it a day.
This.
. Historically cartridges, their manufacturing time and cost to publishers, etc... did. It work better than discs to publishers.
