Comment on Switch 2 vs Steam Deck: the Cyberpunk 2077 face-off
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoI highly doubt it costs that much. You can buy 64GB SD cards for ~$10 retail, which includes:
- margin for retailer
- margin for company making it
- margin for factory producing it
If each step is something like 50% markup (not unheard of), the cost to actually get these things from a factory is probably about $2. Make it a bit more expensive because the packaging is unique to Nintendo, and their quantities are probably a bit less than regular retail SD cards, so maybe it’s like $5 per card.
That’s a lot more than an optical disk, which are probably under $1, but nothing too crazy.
I have no special insight here, just some general understanding of how retail works.
malwieder@feddit.org 1 day ago
There isn’t official pricing nor reliable sources out there so I’m going by rumors.
With your calculation you have to keep in mind that the Switch 2 cards have to somewhat match microSD Express speeds, so a more accurate comparison would be these, but they aren’t available in 64 GB sizes.
All I’ve heard is that they’re expensive and with the larger sizes often required for Switch 2 games it’s an even bigger problem than with Switch (1). These key cards exist for a reason. And I’d bet Nintendo takes a margin on these instead of only requiring the publisher to cover the manufacturing costs.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
Yeah, I assume the key cards have a bit of margin, but they probably need to keep margins low on 64GB cards or devs won’t bother, and physical media does have value for Nintendo’s target market.