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.
Sort of, but the functions changed a bit. For example, in Halo, the black button changed the type of grenade and the white button triggered the flashlight, both of which weren’t really needed frequently. On the XBox 360, it changed to:
throw grenades - B - used to be melee attack (which switched to a bumper button)
flashlight - D-pad - replaced the “lower weapon” action, which was no longer available (was moved to a bumper button in one other game, and removed from others)
Both control schemes are fine, but I honestly thought the black/white buttons were decent. Having some buttons you rarely push but can is nice.
I don’t like them either, but that’s because I prefer the feel of joysticks, not because of any functional reason. For the Steam Controller trackpads, you don’t need to readjust anything, you just hold in the direction you want the camera to be changing, just like a joystick, and they’re massive so you have a lot of range of motion for controlling speed.
It’s a different feel than on the Steam Deck, so I can totally see someone liking the SC trackpads and not the SD ones.
It has two trackpads, which can be used as an alternative to joysticks. It’s actually kinda cool since it kind of works like a mouse with quick flicks and whatnot.
I also prefer controllers (grew up playing Halo on controller), and gyro aim is sweet, but touchpads never felt good to me. I like physical buttons for d-pad style input (even a joystick is fine), and the right touchpad felt too much like a mouse to the point where I’d rather just use a mouse.
The Steam Deck strikes the right balance for me. The touchpads work when the mouse really is preferable, and they stay out of the way when I use the joysticks.