It’s a natural byproduct though. Assuming a free enough market, you should have several people all supplying the same good. Some will compete on price, some on quality, and some on overall service.
The problems happen when competition evaporates, either from regulations raising the barrier to entry, acquisitions, or resource scarcity. Capitalism assumes people are greedy and pits them against each other to provide better services to everyone. A lack of competition isn’t “capitalism functioning as intended,” but instead the opposite, it means something is preventing capitalism from working as intended.
In game time isn’t everyone’s metric for a good game. Some of my favorite games only have a few hours of content, but those few hours are really good.
I’ve watched some let’s plays of Starcraft Valley, and I’m glad I did because I probably wouldn’t like it, and if I had to give it a rating, it would be pretty mediocre.
I think it being so positively rated is that there are a ton of casual gamers that this type of game really appeals to, not that it has a lot to do.
Pretty much every popular indie game has a publisher. Publishers are great because they provide relatively low cost marketing, the trick is to be careful when signing a contract that you don’t sign away too much while still getting value from them.
Yeah, I assume the key cards have a bit of margin, but they probably need to keep margins low on 64GB cards or devs won’t bother, and physical media does have value for Nintendo’s target market.
Buying on PC is a lot cheaper than buying on consoles typically, especially after a year or two, and PC sales are mostly (all?) digital now.
And the thing about cartridges not holding the game is limited to specific games, devs still have the option of putting the full game on a cartridge instead of the license option. All that happened here is that devs got another option on how to sell their game, so if you want to gift someone a digital game but want a physical item to give to them, the license on cartridge option is perfect, and AFAIK it preserves the ability to resell the game (may be dependent on the game though).
I highly doubt it costs that much. You can buy 64GB SD cards for ~$10 retail, which includes:
margin for retailer
margin for company “making” it
margin for factory producing it
If each step is something like 50% markup (not unheard of), the cost to actually get these things from a factory is probably about $2. Make it a bit more expensive because the packaging is unique to Nintendo, and their quantities are probably a bit less than regular retail SD cards, so maybe it’s like $5 per card.
That’s a lot more than an optical disk, which are probably under $1, but nothing too crazy.
I have no special insight here, just some general understanding of how retail works.