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Ludendorkk

(he/him)
and yeah, while playstation consoles have been good about hard drives for almost 20 years now...i really think the high price of vita memory sticks severely hindered the platform, and it feels still like a totally baffling decision to me considering they had already released a model of the psp with no UMD, relying solely on memory space for its media usage. obviously given monster hunter and pokemon i don't think they were ever really going to be keeping pace with the 3ds, but i still think it was incredibly shortsighted.

Former devs have admitted on the record that Vita's proprietary memory existed solely because Sony corporate had no faith in the Vita and demanded it as a way to offload cost on to the consumer
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
AND THE MUSIC. It's fantastic and varied, with some of the best tracks (and unexpected arrangements of classic Mario pieces) coming up in the drives between courses.
+1. The soundtrack is fantastic, and I think it might be mostly exclusive to free roam.
 

LBD_Nytetrayn

..and his little cat, too
(He/him)
Nah, what Microsoft does regarding their storage solutions is probably the most anti-consumer thing in the industry. You really shouldn't want other companies to do what they do. The only thing worse than what MS does is if you just did what Apple does instead where you can't upgrade at all.

Microsoft's proprietary storage is always obscenely expensive and charges way higher than going market rates for the storage they give you. And there's really no purpose for it beyond extracting more wealth from people trapped in their ecosystem. Paying double or triple for storage than if you were to grab an identical SSD off the shelf is fucking bullshit.

Offloading onto an external also kinda defeats the purpose of the Switch. Having to carry around an attached portable hdd kinda defeats the purpose of having something slim and portable to begin with. I personally wouldn't mind since I keep my Switches perma-docked, but initiating a file transfer for USB -- for me -- is probably about as fast as just downloading it again.
I feel like my notion is being misunderstood here.

Both Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch 2 use ancillary memory storage that differs from what came in the previous generation, with the leading factor ostensibly being that speed is the factor, in that newer titles need higher speeds than the older storage mediums can provide in order to run the new titles.

Where they differ is that while Xbox has the option of buying a proprietary storage device that provides the speed needed, you can also attach a different, more common and cheaper drive that you might have even used in that previous generation to store files and run older games on the new hardware, whereas with Nintendo, you only have the option to purchase the new storage medium in order to do anything beyond what the internal memory has.

What I am saying is not "Nintendo should allow you to attach an external hard drive to your Switch 2," but "Nintendo should allow your old microSD cards to be used on the Switch 2, not to run new games, but simply to potentially store new games as well as store/run the games you already have on there from the Switch 1.

Nintendo's may not be proprietary, but that aside, it's still a very similar situation with fewer options for the consumer than Xbox provides.
 

gogglebob

The Goggles Do Nothing
(he/him)
Former devs have admitted on the record that Vita's proprietary memory existed solely because Sony corporate had no faith in the Vita and demanded it as a way to offload cost on to the consumer

I don't know how much it influenced the decision, but it's also worth noting that the PSP had a ridiculous piracy problem, and a big factor in that was likely how effortless it was to swap a standard SD card in and out of a computer. Yes, piracy has been a problem for every console generation ever, but it looked like the OG Xbox and the PSP were two systems where even your grandma somehow had downloaded every ROM in existence. I always assumed Sony recognized this, and decided to make a proprietary format to make that kind of behavior slightly more difficult, and, if piracy was going to be a continuing thing at that level, at least they would be profiting from people wanting more space.
 
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