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Guess what — Nintendo's all-in on physical media. This unsurprising fact became news this week after an executive for Nintendo in Latin America made some mild and extremely uncontroversial comments to the effect. "We know how much the fans like it," Bill van Zyll said, while pointing out that the company had just launched a new platform, in Switch 2, that supports physical cartridges. This is only worth noting due to Sony's unpopular decision to end production of physical PlayStation games starting in 2028, but still: good to know.

As a family-oriented company which still has strong ties to toy retail, Nintendo enjoys a far higher proportion of physical retail sales than any of its competitors, so this position just makes a boring kind of sense. But it also has more to lose; as pressure on memory chip prices continues, Switch game cards are surely much more expensive to manufacture than Blu-ray discs. Hence the functionally empty game-key cards most third-party publishers have resorted to. But when it comes to its own titles, Nintendo still insists on shipping the full game on the card, and hang the expense.

You can tell what matters to Nintendo by what it chooses to spend money on. It typically doesn't go overboard on development budgets for its games, reasoning that expensive graphical fidelity won't add a proportional amount of fun.

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