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But the Switch cards are not MicroSD cards. MicroSD cards are produced at much larger scales than Switch game cards. And there are many manufacturers producing the MicroSDs. That’s why MicroSD cards are so cheap because there is competition. While the game cards are a bespoke design using non-standard flash memory and only produced by Nintendo’s partners in lower numbers than MicroSD cards. I heard from a publisher that they had to pay $8 per unit for the 16GB card when they released a small indie game for the Switch 1. That was almost the price of the digital version. So they had to charge double for the retail version. The Switch cards are relatively expensive that’s why many publishers opted for a small card and forced the consumer to download the rest even when the game could fit on the bigger card. And Nintendo still takes a royalty for every game sold on top of that.
But even if a publisher could buy a 256GB Switch card for $10 bucks that is money not going into the publishers pocket. So of course a publisher like Activision will opt for the smallest card possible so they can earn a couple of bucks more per game sold.
Bet they priced it that high to get ahead of any tariffs that might affect them. Consumers really don’t like to see price hikes right around a launch. Plus they still want to milk the Switch 1 since they probably have a very healthy profit margin on that machine. This price makes the Switch 1 look very appealing for people who still haven’t bought one.
Not a surprise. Anything this company touches is sinking. These giant gaming conglomerates don’t make an iota of business sense. The whole point of a conglomerate buying a whole bunch of similar businesses, aka horizontal integration, is so these businesses can share the same knowledge, infrastructure and supply lines and benefit from economies of scale to lower costs. Like an oil conglomerate using their own tankers to transport oil for all their subsidiaries. But in the gaming industry there is barely any overlap between two studios where synergy can happen. Except for the business admin, promotion and advertising side. But that is a tiny fraction of the costs of big budget production. The biggest cost is on the production side and every studio needs their own set of directors, producers, designers, artists, programmers etc. Another goal of horizontal integration is capturing market share, but with games you run the risk of cannibalizing your own sales especially how Embracer is doing it since most studios in their portfolio are from the same region in the world making games for similar markets.
EA and Ubisoft tried this before and failed miserably and they sold or shuttered almost every studio they bought. The only one who does a good job at it is Sony, but even they don’t have as many studios as Embracer and they rely on Chinese digital asset sweatshops.
And too much innovation will alienate people anyway. People want something new but at the same time want something familiar. If it’s too out there people can’t relate with it, especially before the purchase, and feel it’s too risky to spend time and money on. And for the people who do try it you still need to convince them to push through the beginning stages of the game. Since very innovative gameplay comes with a steep learning curve and not just skill wise since it breaks conventions there is also a cultural (in the gaming sense) learning curve.
This is what ChatGPT says:
This is “Raccoo,” the main character from the indie 3D platformer Raccoo Venture (developed by Diego Ras). In the game, you can unlock different outfits for Raccoo—one of which is the blue, Eastern-inspired costume shown here, complete with the little floating lantern companion.
At least it’s a real game
They cornered themselves by trying to make that future story span multiple games. Especially because everything was written around one character, Desmond Miles and later Layla Hasan. They could have done a “Who do you think you are?” type of format and introduce a new character every game who has to explore his past to solve a problem in their future and just make every story stand alone with an ending but in the same universe. That way they can write better stories without the bagage of the previous games. The whole save the world with the Pieces of Eden story was so dumb
Apparently Nixxes is also working on it https://blog.playstation.com/2024/12/12/the-last-of-us-part-ii-remastered-comes-to-pc-april-3-2025/
Hopefully the technical work is all relegated to Nixxes.
For most people the further they sit away from a screen the less they are going to notice it. And console gamers play on a tv from the couch. Of course if you show them a 60fps version after they played in 30fps they will notice but most people don’t understand why that is and thus not care. Like how many people watch movies with motion smoothing on since they don’t see that it looks smoother than the movies in the cinema.
Rockstar can get away with this since the vast majority of GTA player will be mainstream casual gamers that only have fifa/madden and CoD in their gaming collection.
The troll was able to spoof the Nintendo.co.jp domain because Nintendo didn’t setup their DMARC settings correctly. They have it setup but with policy “none” instead of “reject”. What a bunch of dumb asses. Such a big company doesn’t even protect their domains against spoofing. Probably why they got hacked, they don’t invest enough in IT security. Though this is typical for Japanese corporations.
https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=dmarc%3ANintendo.co.jp&run=toolpage
Not going to happen since Valve doesn’t want to manage a database of IDs. It’s why sex games with real life actors aren’t allowed on Steam since that would require Steam to have IDs and consent contracts of all the actors stored on their side.
And Gaben is a hardcore libertarian, probably despises government IDs.
It’s only a relative handful of games with issues and only one is a Nintendo game. And many with issues are from the same developers. Looks to me that those developers didn’t use the SDK properly. It is a software side issue so could be fixed before the launch if those publishers care enough.