You guys excited for this or unsure or what? I've kind of got mixed feelings about it right now. First, worth noting a few tech things that article (or WSJ) don't: the old style ROM cartridges are not the same thing as "flash" (currently generally NAND-based). Flash is rewritable (though that can be prevented at the hardware chip level of course), and NAND also naturally degrades at rest, it's got a lifetime of about 10-15 years tops even if it's not touched due to gate breakdown. So if they're using NAND I'm not sure how that'll be for collectors, old style ROMs and even high quality pressed (different from consumer burned) optical discs could last way, WAY longer then that. Also, cheap flash also is much slower then pricey stuff, getting speed out of flash requires a good controller chip and channel saturation, RAM etc which all adds cost.
All that said, I still think the world isn't ready for pure digital consoles due to bad infrastructure investments by governments (particularly America, given its market size). So something is needed. And even a slow cheap bit of flash is faster and much physically smaller then optical, which matters if the NX is portable. A 32 gig SDHC card in bulk 1000+ is only like $5 so it's not that huge a premium for physical production, particularly since there will be savings from cutting packaging size (outside of LEs which are premium anyway). So I do think it'd be feasible. It might help them with piracy a bit for a few years. The size and being solid state could be a benefit on the road. I sort of like the idea of loading via the base station, but just a simple cartridge system might be more normie friendly.
You guys want to see the return of cartridges for a home console?
No place in this world for proprietary cartridges, memory cards, and whatever the fuck else. Just distribute Micro SD cards. Use USB for charging.
Wyatt Mitchell
most of your post is irrelevant. If they use cards, they will use non re writeable tech, that lasts forever and cost a fraction of the re writeable stuff for obvious reason. it's not gonna be 5$ for 32 gb, but 5$ for 100.
Ryder Harris
>No place in this world or else what? You gonna bomb their factories?
Zachary Perez
>h-hey guys remember when we made consoles people cared about?
it will fail.
they should drop the console meme and start becoming a mobile games giant, as long as young people still know who mario is
Carter Baker
Why would anyone do cartridges now? I thought everyone moved to CDs because it was overall better in many aspects
Julian Lee
This. partnership with a major phones manufacturer for a gamepad or xperia play styled game-phone and they would absolutely crush the mobile market. pokemon go is literally the perfect example of this. Imagine a REAL pokemon game on mobile. People would shit themselves.
They are. Infinitely so. But these aren't old cartridges, they're new "cartridges", think DS and 3DS games, or vita games. It's basically just an SD card with a label slapped on it.
Joseph Lewis
So I did not know about the life expectancy of NAND.
Doesn't the 3DS use NAND for firmware? Does this mean my 3DS is gonna be fucked some time in the next decade?
Christian Sullivan
blue rays are reaching a limit. flash memories on the other hand recently found new way to work and are promising 100+ GB of data at incomparable speed by the end of next year. Your problem is being a spoonfed simpleton that doesn't follow tech until it's out. so you fear change and believe that things that aren't out yet don't exist.
Parker Edwards
Wait where is the more evidence?
Jonathan Richardson
literally to curb piracy and pander to the retro-trending crowd.
what are they even going to release for it? the usual zelda/mario with zero 3rd party support?
Evan Cox
or else it's going to be next Vita.
Jace Jackson
Because NX is actually a handheld. And handhelds work better with cartridges.
Parker Peterson
>This. partnership with a major phones manufacturer for a gamepad or xperia play styled game-phone and they would absolutely crush the mobile market. pokemon go is literally the perfect example of this. Imagine a REAL pokemon game on mobile. People would shit themselves. I agree that I think Nintendo has missed a huge, HUGE opportunity to "do mobile right" over the last ten years. I don't think the window is closed on them completely but it's too bad. Their core strengths have always been their software and their controls, the computer bit needed to run it has never been what they've been good at. They should be delighted at the opportunity to get the fuck out of that rat race and instead just make a required controller that goes with a smartphone and their games. They could make solid profit on the controller and on the games, still have good game controls, but also have access to vastly better hardware then they'd ever be able to do or get people to pay for purely for a handheld. They could save mobile. At one point I bet they could have gotten major partnership even with someone like Apple, I don't know if that's the case anymore, but I bet they could still pull off some big stuff for Android at least.
What non-flash solid state tech does 25GB+ at $0.0002/GB like you're suggesting user? Seriously, I know of nothing that cheap and big, from anyone.
Alexander Jones
As long as the device is powered on once in the failure time (10-15 years) it will reset that failure time. Same deal with flash memory. Long terms of storage are never good for electronic devices.
Connor Edwards
>curb piracy Yeah that worked great for 3DS
Jackson Nguyen
There is zero (0) chance they will use solid state media. Way too expensive.
Julian Flores
why?
Wyatt Butler
>Their core strengths have always been their software and their controls And they've fucked that up in the worst possible ways for the past 2 generations.
Jonathan Hill
It worked really well. Took year to get anything at all. Literal years. Around one year ago you were still sucking smeallum cock for one of his bullshot
Colton Turner
Forgot Gateway brah?
Landon Lee
How that N3DS hacking going?
Leo Garcia
Yes, if you're living in 1995.
Adam Hill
Yup. Also means SSDs are ticking data loss time bombs.
And your 3DS carts will brick at some point too since its the same kind of flash memory, dunno about DS
Forget about buying new copies too because those will be zeroed out from age as well
Physical 3DS games are literally going to disappear
John King
Um... quite well? Have you been living under a rock?
Eli Baker
>SD cards in cameras, cell phones and other devices are pandering to the retro-trending crowd
Wow, I had no idea.
Evan Mitchell
Disks are inferior in all ways except storage size, which isn't nearly as relevant today as solid state memory isn't nearly as expensive anymore.
Jayden Peterson
Makes sense. I mean otakus, NEETs and hikikomoris are all running out of apartment space. Gotta make those mediums smaller.
Lucas Barnes
Cost, faggot.
Oliver Barnes
He died like a year ago come on man
Kayden Scott
I meant cost vs. storage size.
Nathan Martin
... fine?
John Sanders
Which is and will always be the most significant factor to consider.
Ayden Moore
Eh, it's not that big a deal. You can just buy a flash cart and put roms on there if you really want to play physical carts on the 3ds. If you just want to collect originals, you can keep your old ones.
I don't think it is that big a deal. Plus there will probably be 3ds emulation at some point anyways.
Brayden Russell
The save feature in said games won't work after write/erasing hundreds of thousands of times but the game itself is read only memory.
Flash memory only wears out if you keep rewriting it, faggot. Nintendo has used flash memory since 2001 in Game Boy Advance cartridges. I dunno about you, but I don't see too many GBA games getting bricked.
Brayden Sullivan
>life expectancy of NAND. It's calculated in Cycles not years, NAND has data retention of 10 year this mean, how long data lasts without power.
Both HDD and SSD have this problem, tho no idea how long HDD can hold data probably over 30 years.
Henry Carter
>Yeah that worked great for 3DS It did though. A lot of Sup Forums seems to have trouble with this, but DRM is not about perfection. By definition basically, if you understand what DRM is vs encryption. DRM is pure economics, it's about getting the early spike, not the long tale. Modern vidya devs make most of their money in the first 2-6 months or so, after that they've got the big hump and it's usually into discount territory anyway. If a system eventually gets hacked years later that might be suboptimal from their point of view but often they don't care, because the job is done, they made their money. The die hard pirates are a loss of zero, they'd never buy anyway. What they want are the casuals, the ones who will pirate if it's convenient enough but are too impulsive and lazy to actually wait a long time or go to a lot of effort. That's a lot of the market.
So yeah, eventually sure someone will take it apart and figure it out. But if they can get a good solid number of months (per release) or years (for a full system) out of it then it can still pay for itself. It's economics, not morals.
Xavier Gonzalez
Wasn't Gateway bricking systems like crazy? In fact, I remember the shitposting from people mocking pirates for that.
Jacob Powell
Question
If disks disappear, does that mean that movies will be shipped on cartridges too?
Kino will be impossible or very hard to pirate?
Luis Fisher
No, max cycles and actual physical charge trap break down from sitting there are somewhat different, though opposingly interrelated in terms of design priorities. In an archival scenario (environmental control, protected from radiation etc) an HDD can last a very, very long time. That's just not the purpose of NAND. Which frankly is just fine, most people are moving stuff on a much faster cycle then NAND will break down. Within 10-15 years they'll have new computers or drives and everything will have been transferred anyway, so it never comes up. Or these days lots of people have stuff in the cloud where it's all handled by the service (often with other archival, like tape, too). Cartridges might be one of the very, very few places where it might legitimately cause some people some concern, at least to the extent that collectors still love dusting off NES/SNES ROMs and having them work perfectly.
Though fact is that's a small market anyway so not sure if Nintendo would even care. They may figure a decade or two is good enough, and just plan to upgrade everyone if it ever is an issue.
Nolan Turner
Blu-ray isn't going anywhere. Sony/MS aren't going to do cartridges for their next consoles either, though MS might take another swing at pure-digital. This is just a nintendo thing, which might be a disadvantage or an advantage.
Zachary Ward
Sony is most definitely going to do it if they make another handheld. UMD were a bust, blurays don't fit in handhelds, nor would they ever work.
Ayden Jones
>You guys want to see the return of cartridges for a home console? Only if they look like this.
Austin Collins
I said their next console along with MS, I obviously meant the PS5, duh. Of course a handheld would be solid state, though >if they make another handheld Which they probably won't. Even on the very unlikely chance they actually did (they'd be better off partnering like Nintendo should) that's a case where, like smartphones, they might well just seal it and go full digital, maybe with a PS4/PS5 as a backup method.