Nintendo NX: Why Not Having An Optical Drive Could Potentially Work In The Big N’s Favor

Soldato
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Being on a cartridge doesn't magically make games load fast. Most cartridge based games are tiny compared to modern AAA PC/console titles. You can stick a 50GB game on solid-state memory but you're still going to have to wait to load it.

It'll be a hell of a lot quicker than reading from optical media.
 
Soldato
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It'll be a hell of a lot quicker than reading from optical media.

PS4/XB1 games don't play from optical media, they're cached on the HDD, for exactly that reason.

I doubt any cheapo solid state tech that's economical for use in cartridges is going to be significantly faster loading than HDD. Sad but true, AAA games are big these days! It's going to take time to load them.
 
Soldato
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The whole world is going online/digital/streaming and Nintendo is going back 20 years?

People are still struggling with full downloads/streaming off the console stores. We are abit lucky here in the UK because our downloads are not restricted much. But places in the US have a 30GB download limit a month and full retail games are way over that, not including DLC or day one patches.
 
Soldato
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PS4/XB1 games don't play from optical media, they're cached on the HDD, for exactly that reason.

I doubt any cheapo solid state tech that's economical for use in cartridges is going to be significantly faster loading than HDD. Sad but true, AAA games are big these days! It's going to take time to load them.

Why bring in the PS4/XB1? I'm talking about the Wii U which didn't feature a large hard drive to install games. The load times on Wii U were pretty substantial on some games. Also what makes you say "cheapo solid state tech"? Flash media is cheap as chips these days.
 
Soldato
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Why bring in the PS4/XB1? I'm talking about the Wii U which didn't feature a large hard drive to install games. The load times on Wii U were pretty substantial on some games. Also what makes you say "cheapo solid state tech"? Flash media is cheap as chips these days.

Because it's a real-world example of load times for modern games. Even a cheapo 5400rpm HDD like in the PS4/XB1 can read ~50MB/sec. People can relate to load times for those consoles.

Take a look at prices of flash memory with those kinds of read speeds. They aren't cheap.
 
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Because it's a real-world example of load times for modern games. Even a cheapo 5400rpm HDD like in the PS4/XB1 can read ~50MB/sec. People can relate to load times for those consoles.

Take a look at prices of flash memory with those kinds of read speeds. They aren't cheap.

Costs £25 for a blank Sandisk 64G SD card with 60 MB/s at the time of writing.
 
Soldato
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Costs £25 for a blank Sandisk 64G SD card with 60 MB/s at the time of writing.

That isn't cheap when you're comparing physical media costs, and it's only offering roughly the same performance as a BD-ROM +HDD.

Point anyway is that 'instant load' isn't something that's going to happen. Even if they dished games out on fast consumer grade SSDs you still gotta wait to load assets. Games are big these days.
 
Caporegime
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Costs £25 for a blank Sandisk 64G SD card with 60 MB/s at the time of writing.

A PS4 and XB1 are 6x drives (I believe). I think that is well over 144 MB/S just from the BD drive. As this isn't "fast" enough they cache to HDD which is probably more than double that speed!

Affordable SD media does not exist with those capacities and read/write speeds afaik.


rp2000
 
Caporegime
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A PS4 and XB1 are 6x drives (I believe). I think that is well over 144 MB/S just from the BD drive. As this isn't "fast" enough they cache to HDD which is probably more than double that speed!

Affordable SD media does not exist with those capacities and read/write speeds afaik.


rp2000

I think you're getting Mb/s and MB/s mixed up. 6x BDROM is 27MB/s.
 
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Another reason I'd welcome this and it's an entirely personal perspective, I'm sick and tired of being told a pack of lies.

Cartridge to Disc based games : Oh the media is sooooo much cheaper to produce so of course the savings will be passed on to you, the consumer. aren't we all just peachy :)

Disc based games to Digital distribution : Oh with no physical media to produce obviously the savings will be passed on to you, the consumer. aren't we all just peachy :)

I sincerely hope the big N go back to their roots and offer us a console(s) that don't focus of playing HD streams to our kettle and toaster, that don't promise us a plethora of features that we've had for years on pcs and don't actually need in a console, a simple little device that is a portal to fun and escapism.

No gimmicky controllers ( though I expect them to be superb as nintendo can do incredible control units ) a compact and discrete footprint, a genuine step up in networked gaming experiences with no "premium" memberships, make it powerful enough and cheap enough to entice third party devs, oh and most importantly hold it back for release until it's got at least five A rated titles ready to launch with it.
 
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Yet still significantly more expensive than mass-produced optical media.

Yet that disparity in cost has never been passed on to us, despite it being heralded when disc based consoles launched, because of course then we got stiffed with "oh now we have so much more space to play with our production values have gone up" despite saddling us with more and more sequels ever since.
 
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Another reason I'd welcome this and it's an entirely personal perspective, I'm sick and tired of being told a pack of lies.

Cartridge to Disc based games : Oh the media is sooooo much cheaper to produce so of course the savings will be passed on to you, the consumer. aren't we all just peachy :)

Disc based games to Digital distribution : Oh with no physical media to produce obviously the savings will be passed on to you, the consumer. aren't we all just peachy :)

I sincerely hope the big N go back to their roots and offer us a console(s) that don't focus of playing HD streams to our kettle and toaster, that don't promise us a plethora of features that we've had for years on pcs and don't actually need in a console, a simple little device that is a portal to fun and escapism.

No gimmicky controllers ( though I expect them to be superb as nintendo can do incredible control units ) a compact and discrete footprint, a genuine step up in networked gaming experiences with no "premium" memberships, make it powerful enough and cheap enough to entice third party devs, oh and most importantly hold it back for release until it's got at least five A rated titles ready to launch with it.

True that. Nintendo are the worst culprits when it comes to game pricing. I bet that putting games on cartridges won't make them any cheaper, even if the cartridges are cheaper to produce. Cos Nintendo are stingy *******s with their game prices these days. Over the last few years I've found many instances where buying a physical copy of a Nintendo game was cheaper than the digital download.

I was originally skeptical about this whole cartridge thing. I think the sytem that was patented is going to be a handheld, some sort of successor to the 3DS perhaps. But if it's a full console... one definite advantage would be the noise. On all the consoles I own right now, the disc drives are the noisiest parts of the console. I don't know about load speeds. Does the 3DS load faster than home consoles? If the quicker loading is true then that's nice. Download only would only work if Nintendo include a very good hard drive with their system. Or at least have the ability to swap it out like PS3/PS4 does. I'd say at least 1.5TB in capacity since games are so big nowadays. But conventional mechanical hard drives are also noisy and 1TB+ SSDs are too costly right now. If they want to do this, then they need to think this through well. Though I think the WiiU currently uses up to 32GB of flash storage, such low capacities are dirt cheap.

There's also the fact that Sony own Blu-ray. If Nintendo wants to put a lot of data into physical copies, they have no choice but blu-ray if they stick with discs. Which means paying Sony a royalty for using their technology and making the console a bit more pricey.
 
Soldato
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PS Vita is proof enough that cartridges no longer mean zero loading times.

However this cartridge compatibility talk could just be to let you play your 3DS games on the new console...
 
Soldato
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There's also the fact that Sony own Blu-ray. If Nintendo wants to put a lot of data into physical copies, they have no choice but blu-ray if they stick with discs. Which means paying Sony a royalty for using their technology and making the console a bit more pricey.

Not necessarily, Nintendo have a history of using their own proprietary optical formats rather than using whatever the common standard is, so they could just as easily do the same again.
 
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NX 1 PS5/XB2 0

Can't wait for the next Nintendo console and games. With more power Nintendo becomes more innovative <3
 
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