>>55585975We're no more than 2-3 hardware generations away, sadly. Nintendo has every reason to kill physical. Can't get millions of copies in warehouses and on store shelves globally overnight, and there's always gonna be someone in the supply chain willing to break street date or steal a copy to leak. If you only buy the games from them they don't lose margin to retailers or potential new sales to used copies. Always online means they can ban anyone for anything they dislike at any time.
The switch has cartridges because at launch digital only wasn't viable in areas within their major markets with less infrastructure, but covid forced a lot of improvement so people could work/learn from home. Give it a few years, the only places without reliable internet will be unviable markets Nintendo doesn't care for anyways. The switch's successor will support cartridges to keep the consumers complacent but they'll really push the eshop, try to boil the frog by making the games barely playable out of the box with mandatory updates and frequent verification server connections, strip major features so you must download the update for the full game with fine print on all the trailers and boxes saying so to clear any potential consumer protection laws, and stick the rest behind paywalls like the current online subscription. They'll make physical as impractical as possible then use the declining sales and customer frustration with cartridges as an excuse to promote a digital only version of the console, if that does well out the gate then their next console will be digital only, if it falls short they'll release both a traditional and a digital only version at launch and crank up the pressure to buy digital - maybe only 1st party titles get physical releases, maybe physical comes significantly later, maybe they jack up the prices or drastically limit production - before killing the traditional version of the console entirely and going digital only moving forward.
