this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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I’m more let down that such a small thing is packaged in a big case. Made of plastic no less.
Yeah, I find it particularly weird, because Nintendo already had smaller boxes with the Nintendo DS. Did they decide that the Switch was a big boy console, so it needed to have comically large boxes?
Man you would have had a field day with PC gaming in the 90's!
In fairness though, even though some did skimp out and just launch a CD in, most had a manual and something of lore interest or a physical anti-piracy thing, and a fair few were stuffed full of trinkets or other world building material... just because.
Even my Atari ST edition of Zak McKracken had the floppy, manual, passport anti-piracy card, and a faux-magazine which was both hilarious and acted as a hint book too.
PC games in he 90s were like cereal boxes filled with a few CDs and a the barest of a manual. In the 80s it was the same except it was floppy disks and the manual was needed to get through the copy protection. Sometimes you’d even get a decoder ring of some sorts to decode something for the copy protection.
Good times.
I remember the Kings Quest VI manual came with a red film thingy that you could use to read hints to avoid spoilers. Pretty rad.
Copy protection was a thing well into the 00s and early 2010s. Had to read the code on the manual to install.
Yeah but it wasn’t as fun as in the 80s and 90s when they’d be sending you on a treasure hunt through the manual to find specific words and letters like you were in the DaVinci Code.
PC game cases from 90s were amazing. I wish console games would do something cool like that. They were made of cardboard, typically had boxart with a bunch of high quality engraving, had manuals inside. They felt like collectibles and you didn’t have to pay extra for any of it. It was just part of the base game price.
I've got a Depths of Doom Trilogy box set in the attic. Damn thing was enormous.
Now you're talking my language!
Brilliant set that was, as was Quake: The Offering, Quake II Quad Damage, and the id Anthology. Absolute beasts of boxes!
Never got into PC gaming, but a friend convinced me to buy half life counter strike in high school. It was a chunker of a case.
The total footprints of the two cases are virtually identical. The Switch game cases are taller but not as deep, and the DS cases are shorter and deeper. I believe the DS case is basically the same dimension as a cut-down DVD case. It's the same depth, +/- a mm, with 65mm chopped off the top.
The NDS game case is 134x125mm, 167.5 square cm in total. The Switch game case is 105x170mm, 178.5 square cm in total. The Switch case is also thinner, 11mm vs 15mm. The amounts of plastic used in each is pretty similar.
They need something that both looks good on a shelf and is harder to just slip into a pocket.
They could make it out of cardboard at the very least.
I was never a fan of the GBA cases, so yeah I'm pretty glad they didn't go this way.
Same, I don't get people who throw their plastic game cases away
Psychos.
Well, aren't these supposed to be collected? They are there to help your sort through your phisical games
And my collection would do well with more GameBoy-size cases
I'd rather use a case with something to hold all my carts in personally for sorting. Better if it's small and easily portable.
I miss cardboard game boxes
But without those big-ass cases, there wouldn't be a market for these.
Aluminum cases need to become standard for physical copies. Not plastic with an aluminum veneer, all aluminum.
They can be cool and do aluminum tubes holding a flash drive with the game on it if they want so they can laser engrave the sides and screw on top with the title and art.
So your take on an environmentally unfriendly and resource-intensive way to package games would be to make it worse?
It's a tough one. You're not wrong by any means, but equally the environmentally unfriendly bit is why people buy physical media. The memory card holding the game is mostly superfluous because of day 1 DLC or patches, but it's the box; art; manual; and physical tangibility that matter to a collector of the media.
Ideally there would be a middle ground - sack-off the normal physical edition and purchase the memory cards themselves - and push up the price and pay for a premium edition of the copy made from better materials.
I suspect we'd only get the worst of both worlds though, the cynic in me thinks.
There's also the ability to lend or re-sell physical game-card editions of Switch games.
Ah yes, there is that. Is that still a thing these days? I remember EA's Project Ten Dollar a few years back gating a lot of extra features or multiplayer behind a single use code being fairly widely adopted.
I'll admit to being a bit behind the curve now, I still predominantly use my Xbox Series S, One, and 360 just to play Doom in different rooms so maybe I'm not on the cutting edge of news!
edit: it wasn't five dollars at all, more like ten!
I had to look up that ten-dollar thing. Thankfully I don't think that's a thing yet in the Nintendo world, aside from preorder bonuses.
There have been physical releases that are just a download code in a box, or a game card that contains only one of the two included games, with the second being provided as a paper download code. In those cases the redemption is tied to an individual's Nintendo account. I wouldn't buy any of those, though I'll admit to buying another release (BioShock Trilogy) that was a physical game card with no games stored on it, just launchers for downloading the three games from Nintendo. But at least in that case nothing is account-locked and lending/resale is possible: pop the card in, download the games and play them for as long as the card is in your system.
Aluminum is highly recyclable. Digital media can never be owned.
You recycle your game cases?
Yes?
Where do you keep the games?
No, I hoard them.
I haven't thrown away a game case since Playstation 1. My Super Nintendo ones were cardboard and got destroyed, so I did throw them away because that is what we did in the 90s.
I remember getting Prince of Persia 2008 in a steel case for a birthday or maybe Xmas and loved the design of it. I haven't seen my steel case editions recently.
They still do steel book releases.
The original Gameboy just had form fitting plastic containers for the cartridge and cardboard boxes. id love a return to that..