Killer8
Member
These are salient points. Physical media was already very expensive to do on the Switch because of the proprietary cartridges. As visual fidelity increases, game sizes usually increase alongside that, which would necessitate needing to use the more expensive higher capacity carts. CDPR's community manager has said that shipping The Witcher 3 on a 32gb card already really cut into their profits. As the underlying technology behind these carts hasn't really gotten cheaper, and now Cyberpunk 2077 is shipping on a 64gb cartridge, I wonder how much more their profits will be impacted?
When these profit killing cart prices were indicated to publishers, they likely noped out of even offering a physical release. Physical is still important to many markets like Japan though and publishers do still want some shelf presence. Thus a cheaper download stub alternative, which some publishers already do on their discs on consoles, was proposed to them by Nintendo. A 50gb Blu-ray disc, in terms of raw materials, barely costs anything to manufacture so I feel the outrage is deserved there for not filling it with data. But on Switch 2, where the costs become so high that it jeopardizes even doing a physical release at all, a compromise needed to be made.
Perhaps developers could've had most of the game on the cart so that there's less for players to download and less storage space is occupied by the game. But broadband is nearly ubiquitous in the markets Nintendo operates in so what is really the point of publishers doing that? Naturally they have seized on the opportunity to cut their costs even further, even if they don't actually need to do it (we can confirm this by how small some of the game sizes on the eShop are). Nintendo put the onus on the publishers to decide and they jumped to cheapen out - who's fault is that?
One other argument often brought up is people wanting to have the game on a cartridge for preservation purposes, but this assumes that games are completely static and don't get any updates. Whether the whole game needs downloading via a game key card, or a 200mb patch to sort out some issues, the end result is the same - you don't have a 'complete' game on the cart and its rare that you ever did. Sure, some people will say "well the game is still playable unpatched", but why on Earth would you want to do that? Physical has been symbiotic with digital for a long time in gaming and maybe people are just waking up to that reality.
