Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

I get that Switch 2 games need faster storage, and that makes the traditional model of running games directly from the cart prohibitively expensive, but they could have just copied the Xbox/Playstation model of shipping physical games on slow media (Blurays in their case) and then having a mandatory installation step which copies the data to the fast internal SSD before you start playing. That way you're not entirely dependent on online services to play a physical game.

View on HN

For the Switch any amount of flash memory for those game cards is expensive. They previously offered much smaller, slightly cheaper cards that started at 2GB.

Unfortunately this time they’re only offering 64GB cards or these key cards. I’m curious how much storage they have, I’m sure very little.

Brand name 64GB microSDXC UHS-I cards are $10 retail. Figure Nintendo can get the actual flash storage directly much cheaper than that, probably more like $3-5. That hardly seems like a meaningful cost saving measure for a physical game, especially on a console that's pushing upwards of $80 as the game price.

> Figure Nintendo can get the actual flash storage directly much cheaper than that, probably more like $3-5

Not necessarily. Nintendo’s variant is built by Macronix under their XtraROM service; a variant of NAND flash designed to be a reliable Mask ROM substitute (including only being writable once, automatic repair afterwards, etc). Officially, their chips are rated to last 20 years at 85 degrees Celsius, which is insane.

This isn’t your off the shelf SD card chip built by a no-name Chinese design company that fails after 3 years of not receiving power. Combine the niche flash with a custom security chip (Lotus3) on every game card; that’s not cheap.

While we don’t know the exact pricing, the rumors are that 64GB is somewhere in the $15-$25 range per cartridge. At those prices, even if I ran a game company, I’d be reserving the non-game-key versions for a Deluxe Collector’s edition.

People's 3DS games are already being found to be unplayable after sitting on the shelf and switch games will meet the same fate. Nintendo has been failing both paying customers and preservationists for a very long time now. Piracy will again be the only way people will have to play many Nintendo switch titles. In other cases, people will have to wait for nintendo to release a limited selection of overpriced (and sometimes edited/censored) versions of certain older games on whatever future platform they're currently pushing.

I did some Googling and there doesn't seem to be an epidemic of 3DS game carts failing, I can find a few isolated reports but that feels as expected to me.

It also sounds like you can extend the lifespan my making sure to boot up your cartridge in a 3DS every so often, because Nintendo gave them an error correction routine: https://gbatemp.net/threads/nintendo-switch-3ds-cartridge-li...

Strange, my copy of fitbox died after about 2-3 years of occasional use without any abuse.

To be fair, this was the case for my Joycons too (Calling it drift is branding, they are effectively unusable)

I like Nintendo's games but their QC has always been a little off. I got bad joypads even in the 80s when we got a NES. (Not having the internet and being a dumb kid I thought I was only limited to moving up and left on Zelda for whatever reason)

I have an Xbox 360 wired controller that I purchased circa 2008. I use it at least 1-2 times a week - these days for gaming on PC mostly, although I still pull the 360 out of the closet from time to time. The thumbstick rubber is definitely starting to get a little worse for wear at this point, but the controller still functions perfectly.

I cannot understand how we used to engineer controllers that last, and now we just... don't.

Literally have the same thing; a wired XBOX360 controller that I bought a long time ago. I had to clean up the gunk inside a few years ago, but it still works perfectly fine.

I've seen some videos explaining the cause of the Joycon issue and it feels like it must be cost cutting (on the most important component of the device). People even fix it temporarily with a piece of cardboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StRvTiRagPo

Keep in mind, these are 100$+ in Canada. Per my experience, I think it will be another 40 years until I buy another Nintendo console.

I think it's literally cost-cutting. Parts that used to be built well enough that they last years are now built just well enough to not fail in testing.

Luckily, you can now buy third-party controllers that use hall effect sensors.

Dead zones. Older controllers had bigger dead zones so the wear didn't matter as much. Switch joycons are physically smaller sticks so this makes the problem worse. There's even less tolerance to wear.

Digital Foundry said these cards are estimated to cost game companies 16 bucks per unit.

That sounds like a better deal for Nintendo than SNES Game Paks, and much better than N64.

Maybe Sony was actually onto something with UMDs :P

I think we only know the maximum physical cartridge size for Switch 2 is at 64GB as you write, but the CD Projekt interview about Switch 2 indicates there is/are other sizes available.

It’s to prevent warez rips as well, though. Performance of the SD card can be easily worked around; blocking the non-preservation segment community that just wants to download and play Switch games without paying for them — the majority of which don’t care about historical preservation or speedrunning — is made much easier by simply not loading new games from SD cards at all.

If stopping piracy was the main motivation for this change then all games would ship on GameKey carts, but they are still offering real carts to publishers who are willing to pay extra for the flash.

It's rare for physical media to be the weak link in console DRM nowadays, when piracy does happen it's nearly always enabled by a full system jailbreak at which point you can just as easily pirate digital games.

It's up to the publisher how much DRM they want. Just as publishers choose whether or not their game on Steam uses DRM, publishers for Switch 2 decide whether their game will use GameKey or not.

It’s not all or nothing. They made ripping of the most valuable games more difficult in exchange for lower prices for publishers, a win-win scenario for their platform, and those few who will insist on having a no-download experience can pay extra to do so. Obviously platform compromises will continue to make ripping possible, but this isn’t about all or nothing prevention, it’s about ratcheting up the difficulty level.

> It’s to prevent warez rips as well, though.

There's basically no chance that this scheme will prevent piracy. Once again the pirates will have the superior product and paying customers will be screwed over.

Not to mention there is an alternative to SD cards, which is what modern mirrorless cameras have been moving to.

CFexpress cards. Basically M2 nvme cards in a external pluggable form factor.

The Switch is a portable device, so this "slow media" would have to be some form of solid state memory. And unfortunately, cheap flash memory tends to also have a short self life. That doesn't exactly help with preservation!

All else being equal, I'm happy Nintendo went with the more expensive media, even if it means some smaller titles likely won't be available physically. (In my eyes, a key card does not count as a physical release.)

I'm mostly just happy the key cards are clearly labeled so I can avoid buying them...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com