It’s time to go old school- Nintendo have confirmed that the Nintendo Switch, their upcoming system, will be using cartridges to play games, instead of optical discs. This makes the Switch Nintendo’s first home console since 1996’s Nintendo 64 to use cartridges instead of optical media.
This also means, amusingly enough, that games such as Skyrim and NBA will now be played from cartridges. Of course, cartridges are now a far more viable format than discs- they have more storage, shorter read times, variable capacities, extensibility, and they’re not expensive either. Nintendo going with cartridges makes total sense- though one does wonder whether this means no backwards compatibility with Wii U (3DS backwards compatibility, at least, seems to be likelier).
From what we can see, the cartridges seem to be even smaller than 3DS cartridges- more along the lines of a Vita cartridge. It’ll be hard not to lose them!
The Nintendo Switch launches in March 2017.
Thanks, Neogaf.
