As someone who has 4 nephews I would hope they sort out some kind of digital replacement for physical media that works in exactly the same way across multiple accounts and systems as present. 

Given it's Nintendo I have next to no faith that they will be the ones to manage this. Until someone does then digital media is not a comparable solution in a good deal of cases.

Depends what the other Happy Meal toys are. Mario or fever dream cartoon cat with syringes for eyes? Please Mummy, let me have the plumber.

Diluted Dante wrote:

Fuck retail. Adds nothing. Someone should be brave and cut them out entirely. (Sorry DD)

It adds the gifting market. Which is still huge. Did you know that the single most popular Happy Meal toys are Super Mario? Which means despite the view that kids don't care about the plumber, they clearly still do like Mario. I would say that after Minecraft as well, Mario would be the merch I see kids wearing the most, above even all of Marvel combined. Zelda appears to have become an adult franchise though, I'll grant that.

You can gift stuff fine on dl only platforms like iOS and android. Not quite the same as in the old days but gifting will still be possible.

I suspect the nostalgic among us may prefer the unwrapping of a gift and the smell of fresh cardboard over a blinking icon in your inbox alerting you you've received a gift.
N64 kid would agree with you.

You could say the exact same things about music and film but look where those markets have gone. It's inevitable that in 5-10 years games retail will be all but dead.

Download only future is a grim place for games I think. I only accept it on steam because the chance of that disallowing me access to something I bought a few years ago is slim.

The risk of libraries becoming unsupported as servers get turned off is a worry. Are there platforms that already applies for? PSP? Wii?

Surely retail can just be ignored if you're not interested in it. How is it irritating?

The existence of retail and 2nd in particular is keeping the price of your download games at a sensible (less unsensible?) price for the time being too.

I like retail. Although I hate shopping you get more cheap games than you seem to on DL. And seeing all the games in front of you is much better than relying on the presentation vagaries of digital stores. I don't always know what game I'm going to get and impulse buying and stuff is much easier in a shop. Otherwise you're relying on some curated themed collection, new releases, what's hot and other shit. I agree it's on the way out but think we'll lose something of value when it does go.

WorKid wrote:

Games dev is getting silly expensive and imo retail adds nothing of value - in fact it's just an irritant - so it's inevitable it'll be cut out. Whether that's Nintendo sending out discs in the post or, ideally, sensible download pricing, I don't know. The days when big publishers needed retailers are coming to an end if they haven't actually already.

It adds visual advertisment in shops.

I think even if stuff is dl only there'll be displays for dl codes.

Anyway that's if DL stays a thing. Spotify and Netflix are showing that even dl in product is somewhat unecessary.

That's just about online games though rather than delivery systems.

DL only is inevitable, but Nintendo in their current state don't seem like the company to lead the way. Why risk pissing off the people who sell lots of their consoles and excluding people with shit internet. A blu ray drive lets them reach a much wider audience for a pretty negligible cost.

I think we need to see MS or Sony try a download only version of their current hardware and have it succeed first. Not faffing about with discs is nice, but remember that hinting at removing physical ownership was one of the things that burned MS this gen.

I think IR is right and we'll probably see a DL only version of one or both of the bone and Ps4 towards the tail end of the gen as a water tester for their next boxes.

I would buy a machine with no optical drive if it was say £50 cheaper than the with drive option. They should do that. Win/win.
I have a smaller, cheaper, quieter machine.
I'm also tied in to their pricing and they cut out the middle man.

And. .. is that good or bad or just news?

Dumping powerpc signals the lessening of the chance of bc

mistercrayon wrote:

Dumping powerpc signals the lessening of the chance of bc

That's where that OS framework thingy comes in.
Not sure if Ninty has the skills to fork an open source OS tho'...