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.
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.