Luigison said:This SNES talk got me wondering about the price of Blu-ray and DVD vs. solid state memory chips like the 3DS uses. Could we possible be going full circle in the future? Imagine the reaction if Nintendo went BACK to cartridges/chips in a home console.
manufacturing cost is low on the 3DS cards, you can see here how much of it is silicon and it is not much larger than your fingernail. It is not the memory capacity perse that is costly, it is the physical silicon that makes up these chips. Capacity costs more if you have to double up on ROM chips like they used to do on larger N64 or SNES cartridges, but the limit of current ROM is how small they can print the circruits in these chips.
That said, it currently is still a premium to produce 2GB cards in mass production.
I don't see them going with a format that is slightly larger than GC discs when they already have plain old DVDs that hold twice that amount single sided.
The worst you can expect is that is uses NoD (Nintendo optical disc) format and not its blu-ray equivalent.
That said, I think there is a possibility they may include a cartridge slot for DS/3DS games. There is certainly good reason to speculate that the eshop might be integrated cross platform.