Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

videogameschronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 134 posts

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#91

Post by xmodem »

jbm wrote: post #59
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

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 o…

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.

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#92

Post by kbolino »

Cipater wrote: post #75
autoexec wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game pass doesn't seem terribly popular. Xbox in general isn't doing very well compared to the other consoles. I think they'll keep pushing for games as a service though. It's too tempting to keep all that control out of the hands of players.

It's only available in 40 out of 195 countries in the world and they have zero plans to expand it. They must not care much about it.

That doesn't mean much. And 40 countries is actually a pretty large amount for this sort of thing. Companies like this are accustomed to (near-)first-world unit economics and market dynamics and they struggle at best to adapt to conditions outside of that bubble. They likely have metrics showing very few potential customers, for various reasons like low ownership of eligible hardware or low exposure to relevant advertising or high rates of piracy setting the price to compete with near zero, etc.

There are logistical challenges that have to be solved, and both upfront and ongoing costs that have to be paid, for every new country that needs to be served, and often these are unlikely to be recouped. If they foreseeably reach 90+% of their potential customer base and revenue (or think so anyway) from those 40 countries then not expanding beyond them is a practical decision that doesn't extrapolate to not caring within those 40.

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#93

Post by staticman2 »

kllrnohj wrote: post #33
mattl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#95

Post by kubb »

jsheard wrote: post #74
kubb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how do unofficial WoW, Diablo 2 or Lineage 2 servers exist? Enthusiasts run them for free.

Due to huge reverse engineering efforts which few games get, especially after the official servers have already shut down so there's no reference implementation anymore. For every game which gets unofficial servers, a few dozen never will.

So people can run servers even without the server source code, and the problem preventing leaving the server code to the Library of Congress, etc. is not "the cost and knowledge base required to keep servers running".

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#96

Post by jbm »

xmodem wrote: post #91
jbm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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…

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.

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#97

Post by Wowfunhappy »

autoexec wrote: post #61
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

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 some…

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...

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#98

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jsheard wrote: post #16

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…

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...

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#99

Post by kbolino »

proc0 wrote: post #87
ferbivore wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All games with a budget over $10m will be online-only gacha soon enough because it would be fiscally irresponsible to do anything else. The only reason you can still "buy" large games - to whatever extent you still can, you're mostly leasing games if you don't pirate them anyway - is irrationality and inertia on the part of publishers, which I doubt will last forever under shareholder pressure. A lot of games are alr…

I think that's true for multiplayer games, which is understandable because they are more like platforms, even social media, because it has to support a community of people that play with each other. Single player games will still exist though, and companies will still try to make them online games that can be patched often and have online stores (latest assassin's creed does this), but we should all agree this is no…

There's definitely been a shift in what it means to be a multiplayer game. Live service games are crowding out the other forms.

Split-screen, LAN, and even Internet play without fixed servers all existed once upon a time (and still do, to a limited extent). But they aren't what people usually mean when they say "multiplayer" anymore. However, they all have the advantage of staying playable basically forever, with the only real limitation being the ability to emulate older tech.

Re: Game preservationists say Switch2 GameKey Cards are disheartening but inevitable

#100

Post by f33d5173 »

lelag wrote: post #35
mysteria wrote: post #6

In the computer games industry pretty much everything has been download only for some time as the assets are too large for DVD and BD never caught on for PC. Places like GOG provide unrestricted offline installers but the majority are provided via a storefront like Epic or Steam. The worst case scenario for preservationists is for games to become a streaming service via cloud gaming, which publishers may like since i…

Interesting point about PC going digital-only as Nintendo is a fascinating counter-example. While they offer digital downloads on the eShop, their pricing actively discourages it. Case in point: I just bought my kid a new first-party Switch game. Physical copy on Amazon was ~25% cheaper than the identical digital version on Nintendo's own eShop. Even my 9-year-old noted how illogical it seems, the physical version re…

Price discrimination. Digital is more convenient to the consumer, hence by nature they prefer it. Consumers who are more price sensitive can instead choose to put up with the inconvenience of a physical purchase in exchange for a cheaper price.
Post reply on HN