• THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    8 days ago

    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.

      • towerful@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        8 days ago

        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.

        • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          8 days ago

          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.

          • tempest@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            8 days ago

            The actual reason is that the flash storage is expensive.

            I’m sure the dev gets a bigger cut if the cart is cheaper

            • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              8 days ago

              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.

              • tempest@lemmy.ca
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                8 days ago

                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.

                • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  8 days ago

                  Sure, but that’s when the cost factor you mentioned come in. If players can’t even run off the card, why spend the money on it? And so we get key cards.

                  • tempest@lemmy.ca
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    2
                    ·
                    8 days ago

                    So you can actually ‘own’ the game. Right now if you have the key card but Nintendo is inaccessible you don’t actually have a game you have ewaste

      • THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        7 days ago

        I think they’ve been trying for longer than Sony. They had the Xbox One S all Digital. Fittingly, the Xbox One SAD. But with Sony shooting themselves square in the dick, even 13 years removed from E3 2013, Microslop can indeed capitalize on this. They probably won’t, but they could.