You would be severely hampering one of your main selling points (unified library) by forcing people to either buy two copies or buy digital to take advantage of it. That would be a huge turnoff for a lot of people attracted to the unified library. Why would Nintendo hamper themselves with such a disadvantage when trying to convince people to invest in their platform? Can't see that happening. You don't push someone to something they don't want, if they want the unified library but don't want to buy digital. That's a good way to lose a lot of sales. Sure, carts are going to cost a little more, but it's the only real option for what they are trying to achieve and a major added benefit to the added value of the platform.
Nintendo
should be pushing people to go digital, it would be considerably more profitable for them. Movies, music and PC games have all made the push away from physical media and games consoles are pretty much the only place left where a physical disc or cartridge is the norm for customers. Give it a few more years and Nintendo may have been able to release the NX without any physical media at all, but as it is they don't have much of a choice and have to maintain a physical option. That doesn't mean the the physical media has to have primacy, though, and on the contrary they should be positioning the NX as a platform where digital downloads are the best choice for customers.
I don't know, I still think a shared physical media would hugely benefit their marketing, cementing the idea of a common NX software lineup. Not to mention retailers would just need one area to serve both home and portable audiences.
Costs are an issue of course compared to optical media, but since that didn't stop the DS - and to a lesser extent the 3DS - to sell games in the millions, I believe it's something publishers might come to terms with relatively easily.
Cost of carts which hold handheld assets are one thing (especially when there's no alternative), costs of carts which hold both handheld and home console assets are another thing altogether.
Also, the NX is going to need to find a way to play the same physical media across both devices.
Why? They need
digital purchases to work across both devices, but I see no reason to believe that the people who are most interested in cross-play are going to be insistent on having a physical copy of the game. If anything, I'd say people who want to play a game across two devices are going to be a lot more interested in digital downloads. The appeal of the whole "start a game of Monster Hunter on the train and continue it on the big screen when you get home" idea is somewhat subdued if you left the cartridge in your home console and can't play it on the train in the first place.
Which do you think is more expensive: a disc AND a cartridge or just a cartridge?
If the cartridge only has the handheld assets on it, then a disc and a cartridge.
Unless you think their next handheld will have an optical drive.
Fewer SKUs, less spent in retail space while serving a larger amount of customers, less spent in shipping due to fewer SKUs and less packaging requirements so you can ship more copies per pallet...
The benefits extend beyond just Nintendo in terms of cost savings, too. Then there's potential benefits to load times, saves being moved off of the internal storage for easier portability, removal of an expensive hardware component that is the #1 reason for console repairs...
We've really got to a point where the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, now that the technology has caught up to (and in some ways surpassed) optical media.
Sony sticks with optical media because it has a stake in its future, not because it's better or even necessarily cheaper for the industry. And lord knows Microsoft would have gone all-digital this generation if they could have gotten away with it.
Cartridges certainly have technical advantages over discs (they always have), but the only one that's really going to factor into Nintendo's decision is cost. By the time the cost difference is truly insignificant digital downloads will have completely supplanted them both.
"Several orders of magnitude"?
You do know what an order of magnitude is, right? When all is said and done, it might be one order of magnitude more for cartridge vs. disc. This isn't the late 90s anymore.
And that is something that puts it within the realm of possibility, especially since they'll be pushing digital even harder this time.
A disc costs a couple of cents. A 64GB flash cart (which is what you'd be looking at to hold both home console and handheld assets) costs a couple of dollars. That's two orders of magnitude in decimal, or six or seven orders of magnitude in binary, if you prefer. However you define it it's an added expense that cuts into profits, and not just Nintendo's profits, but also third parties'. Nintendo aren't exactly in a position where forcing a lower software margin on third parties is going to do them any good.
If anything, Game Cards could possibly be phased out before discs are, as they are the pricier medium and lack the convenience of the all-digital mobile market. Portable software usually carries with it a smaller file size as well, and so it should be easier to migrate this market to digital.
