Yoshi and the Mysterious Book will sell for $60 in the eShop and will have an MSRP of $70 for the physical cartridge.
An opmist would say that it is $70 game and they are adding a $10 discount for buying it digitally. A pessimist would say that it is a $60 game and there is a $10 fee for the plastic cartridge.
With the price of flash memory going up, they’re definitely charging a fee for the cartridge.
Honestly it never ever made sense to price a digital download at the same point as a physical object. Providing a digital download is entirely infrastructure costs, the cost of delivering “a copy” to the customer is fractions of a penny. Meanwhile, for a cartridge, for every copy, Nintendo (for example) has to buy a bunch of plastic and EMMC, image that flash storage with Mario Odyssey, print labels and stickers and encase that chip in more plastic, wrap that plastic in more plastic, ship those crates of plastic across the ocean, all to sell them to walmart and gamestop that take a cut of the sale themselves. When a customer downloads Mario Odyssey, all sixty dollars go straight to Nintendo.
These are ROM, not flash memory. Unless Nintendo is even more unhinged than we give them credit for.
I’ve claims they use eMMC, which is flash memory. Closer to SD card grade than SSD, but SD card prices are up too.
I imagine they’re using the eMMC data bus standard, but it’s pants-on-head moronic to use flash chips for what’s supposed to be permanently nonvolatile storage. Flash media is not storage stable if it’s not powered regularly; ask anybody with an old Windows install USB drive that’s more than a couple of years old and they’ll tell you all about it.
If this is so, that also opens up the inevitability of the data in cartridge games decaying and eventually becoming lost forever. Your cartridges would literally rot on the shelf.
Actually come to think of it, I wouldn’t put it past Nintendo to do that deliberately and be salivating at the very thought.