this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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This article is trash Kit has no authority or knowledge of what Nintendo is going to do and the way the headline is written makes seems like he does. The headline should be written "Podcaster Thinks Physical Is Here To Stay Cause He Really Hopes It Does as That's His Preference"
Key cards are going to be pushed as hard as they can. For two reasons. It gives nintendo more control over pirates and makes carts cheaper. As production and cost of carts has plagued nintendo since the 80s.
I could see the next console having a 5/6G connection built in like kindle had just for the purpose of downloading games before they give up on key cards.
He's a former marketing lead of Nintendo, so completely dismissing him as a "podcaster" feels not entirely fair.
He doesn't know everything, but he's got a pretty good idea being there for 13 years during the Wii, Wii U and Switch era
I agree with i may have been harsh it was more a reflection of the way the headline was used not a reflection of Kit. I listen to them all the time so I value his thoughts. This article was just bad journalism.
It absolutely does not make the cart cheaper. Same amount of plastic and silicon. The only exception would be the special carts that have to include more memory chips for unusually large games.
Strangely, there’s a minimum amount of memory each key cart will have, regardless of how little of it is used. At a certain point it becomes more expensive to make special chips with less memory on them. Nintendo and 3rd parties will buy the cheapest chips, which will more likely than not have enough space for the whole game regardless of whether or not the whole game gets loaded on it.
What it does do is make the cart less valuable and pretty much worthless to resellers. Destroying the aftermarket is one of Nintendo’s goals.
So from my understanding you can buy a key card play it in your switch two then turn around and hand it to me and it will just work as long as the Nintendo servers are active.
Also it does make it cheaper since you only have to store a small amount of memory for the cert a few mb at most and they can make a whole bunch of them as they are all the same. With non game cards you only have to deal with 32 GB cards or a 64 GB for bigger games so ether the game doesn't fit or you have to use two cards.
With game key cards size doesn't mater you could go up to 150gb and the user can just download it as long as the store stays online. It also stops game ripping with the migswitch. As the data is no longer on the card.
Please know I hate this as much as the next guy. I'm just saying nintendo doesn't care as this has been their brass ring they been gunning for for decades.
You are thinking of the Bill of Materials cost, which is not the same as fab cost. Higher data densities absolutely do cost more to fab, and are upcharged to companies and individual consumers for profit. Nintendo has to pay more for higher density storage amounts and so do you.