CDs have been making a slow comeback for the past year or two, and global CD sales actually went up last year for the first time in over a decade. If it’s anything like the vinyl or cassette resurgence, I imagine it won’t be too difficult to find places that sell CDs in a few years.
Yup.
I was vaguely interested in Dark Souls for years, but every time I tried, I bounced right off it. I went through a cycle where every year or two, I would pirate one of the souls games, try it out, give up on it after an hour or so, and do it all over again the next time I was sufficiently compelled to give the series another shot. This happened until several years ago when I tried Dark Souls II, and for some reason it finally clicked. I played my pirated copy of Dark Souls II for about 10 hours, before a random crash corrupted my save file.
After that happened, I immediately bought the game on Steam and proceeded to play it for the next month and a half, until I eventually beat it. I’ve since purchased every souls game plus Elden Ring on Steam, and recently imported a copy of Bloodborne GOTY edition after spending $700 on an exploitable PS5, just so I could play it at 60FPS. None of these legitimate purchases would have ever happened if I hadn’t been able to repeatedly pirate Dark Souls for about five years.
Which sucks, because Arkane was one of my favorite developers before the quality of their output fell off over the past five years. I loved the Dishonored games, and Prey is the single best immersive sim ever made. I was looking forward to DeathLoop, but it ended up being kinda meh, and Redfall has been so universally panned that I haven’t even bothered to try it.
This shouldn’t be an issue. Nintendo has allowed for carts containing multiple titles for years now. Inserting the cartridge causes all the games on it to appear on the home screen.
The Switch is massively popular. Assuming the cartridge works and sells even somewhat well, we will 100% see games being shared in whatever format it uses. It might take awhile for the Switch’s full back-catalog to be dumped and uploaded in the new format, but popular / recent titles will be circulated within a matter of days. If there’s a way to convert existing XCI / NSP rips to the new format, there are plenty of individuals / groups who will race to get everything converted as quickly as possible.
Assuming the cart is completely transparent to the Switch, which is likely to be the case, then I see no reason why updates wouldn’t download as normal. If Nintendo is able to detect the carts and ban Switches that use them, it may still be possible to access updates by rolling them into the same file as the base game and loading them from the cartridge. Personally, I think the second option is fairly likely, as it’s already possible to do this with NSP rips, and it’s the method that offers the most resistance to whatever countermeasures Nintendo may deploy.