I don’t mind digital ownership on steam because I’m usually paying like $5 for a game, and in the unlikely event I need it in the future and it has been taken away, I have options. 🏴☠️
If I paid $60 for it, things get a little more personal.
What about the rest of the industry?d
This is how you set a precedent. You then use that to bring to heel the rest.
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.
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.
Give Xbox time and they’ll no doubt announce it.
