 Hey everyone, today we're gonna be talking about Tears of the Kingdom again. I know, right? What a shocker. I actually was trying to make a non-Zelda video today, or at least a combination news video where maybe if there's Zelda stories, it's just part of a bigger pack of news. Unfortunately for me, everything is Zelda or maybe fortunately because you guys love that Zelda news but I'm trying to like mix in other Nintendo news. There just isn't anything happening and the news surrounding Tears of the Kingdom just won't stop. So today we got to talk about two big stories, something that A.G. Alnuma told us about the game that for some of you might have been frustrating for me is actually quite brilliant because most video game studios don't get the opportunity to do what the Zelda team got to do over the last year and the other thing has to do with, well, what cartridge size are they using exactly and why and its implications possibly on the price point and on Nintendo moving forward. Before I get into that news, I just want to say, hey, we're on our road to 133,000 subscribers. We have a giveaway going on down in the pin comment or the description for a Hylian Shield replica and some other things because you know what, as much as this channel keeps growing, I like to reinvest in the community. Also guys, I'm turning 37 this year, which is as old as the actual Zelda series and I'm still chasing my dreams here being a full-time YouTuber that can support their family and live a pretty good life and you guys have helped me get to the position where I technically am working full-time on YouTube right now. So thank you guys so much. If you want to continue to help support my dream and help me show my children and inspire maybe others out there to continue to chase their dreams, no matter how old you are, I do think it's important to have a dream and continue to reach for the stars. Go ahead and just subscribe to the channel. That's all I'm really asking. I'm not asking for your money. I'm not asking for anything other than stuff you can do absolutely for free. All right guys, let's get into the Zelda news. Now, here we have our first bit of news and we actually get this from Spawnwave. So Spawnwave is a fellow YouTuber out there. I'm sure you guys have heard of him. If you haven't, he posts a news video Monday through Friday called Newswave. He has his Spawncast podcast every Saturday and on weekends he tends to drop little bonus videos. Sometimes he has unboxings or teardowns of things and he also has a Spawnwave Plus channel where he goes into individual news topics like we do. Now what's interesting about his channel over the weekend is he dropped a video where he took apart the Nintendo Switch Tears of the Kingdom cartridge. Now, I'm not willing to do this because I don't have the proper tools to basically open it without potentially breaking the cartridge. So he opened it up because he wanted to examine to see if Nintendo actually used a 32 gigabyte cartridge with Tears of the Kingdom. Now remember, Tears of the Kingdom was originally listed at like 18.2, 18.3 gigabytes and then they reduced it about a month before launch down to 16 gigabytes is what it said officially on the website. We found out later it was actually 15.9 and then there was like 300 megabyte or so day one patch. Now what's interesting about that 15.9 size is that is below 16 gigabytes. So some people thought Nintendo reduced the size of the game, potentially cut content so they could fit it onto a 16 gigabyte cartridge. Now I noted back then it doesn't actually make sense. It only makes sense if you don't know anything about how NAND flash memory works. Flash memory, whether it is NAND flash or your M.2 SSDs, your SATA SSD drives doesn't really matter, any sort of solid state drive or solid state storage requires extra headroom in the storage for redundancy. If you do not allow that redundancy to exist the drive will actually fail. So they gotta leave space. So when you see, oh, there is a 128 gigabyte SSD you're not actually gonna have 128 gigabytes of space. You might have 120 gigabytes of space because they gotta leave headroom in there for how SSDs work. So when we're talking about, oh, a 16 gigabyte cartridge there's not actually 16 gigabytes of space. It's probably more like 13 gigabytes of space. And that being said, when you're talking about this I always knew they had to use a bigger size but the question was, are they really using 32 gigabytes? Were they somehow using an 18 or a 20 gigabyte? Did they like use some custom size to try to save money? However, manufacturing wise usually a custom size is more expensive and it turns out that at least according to everything that's palm wave could uncover they are indeed using a 32 gigabyte cartridge. So this isn't the only Nintendo Switch game to use a 32 gigabyte cartridge. There are plenty of them out there specifically from third party companies but this is the first first party Nintendo game to use a 32 gigabyte cartridge and obviously it's being mass produced, right? Tens of millions of these cartridges are being mass produced for tears of the kingdom. So then you have to say back and go, well, what does this all mean? One, it obviously means that the cost of 32 gigabyte cartridges probably will come down slightly over time for third parties. However, I believe it was Nate Drake who noted over on the family board forums that the cost for Nintendo is about 14 bucks per cartridge at 32 gigabytes. I'm not quite sure if those numbers are 100% accurate. Even to me, that seems like that might be a little bit more expensive than what Nintendo can probably get. This would require deep knowledge of Nintendo's at cost and cost of materials and their actual contracts of manufacturers. I was thinking probably closer to like eight to $10 per cartridge for Nintendo but who really knows, right? What we can say though is it's expensive and for some this justifies that $70 price point because this is Nintendo's first game to need a 32 gigabyte cartridge, it's more expensive, pass that cost on to consumers, air go $70. I will also say that I don't really think that's the reason for the $70 price hike but at least it gives you a logical perspective at that we've seen third-party companies using cartridges charge more on Nintendo Switch because the cartridge costs it. So it's not unheard of for companies to upcharge over cartridge costs. That being said, it is interesting to see and it does seem to me potentially to normalize a 32 gigabyte cartridge moving forward if Nintendo's mass producing them now or if they're gonna mass produce similar cartridges like that for third parties on the next system. This is good news. Also, Macronix by the way announced a new 96 layer NAND flash that they're working on which by the way, Nintendo uses Micronix. This or Micronix or whatever, so yeah, Nintendo potentially could see even better NAND flash available for the next system, not necessarily cheaper NAND flash though but NAND flash technology is moving forward where Nintendo could get 64, 128, et cetera in that similar form factor moving forward but again, it's still gonna be stupidly expensive and I don't know how many people are gonna be willing to actually use that. Now we get to our next story. Let's get to this tweet put out by Gene Park and then I read the article just to confirm this was an interview conducted by The Washington Post and in this tweet it says, I.G. Alduma said when he announced in March, 2022 a delay for Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, the game was actually complete. The last year of development was spent making sure the physics of the game worked. So polish, polish, polish. Now, this is something that games today are often very criticized for, AAA games especially, that there's a lack of polish. It just, the game has so many bugs, so many breaks, you're quickly trying to patch. We saw this with Scarlet Violet which still isn't patched correctly, that games are launching in what feels like an incomplete broken state and then they feel like we'll just patch it later and the Zelda team didn't do that. The Zelda team when they delayed the game it wasn't because the game needed more work. So the game was actually quote unquote developed in less than five years. However, they needed time to polish the game because one thing this game is being praised for by developers across the board. Like we've seen this over and over again is the elements of the physics combined with the elements of the ultra handability especially let alone recall and others and how it just works and things don't break. A lot of them are, they're finding their minds just boggled. Not the idea to attempt to have such systems in a game but to have those systems just work. It just works. Like you don't have any fear of anything breaking because it just works and why is that the case? Because the Zelda team was given a full year to make sure when players went hands-on with this game that it just works. That is something the rest of the industry should really take note on is if you're making a AAA game maybe take a year to polish the damn thing. A lot of games and this is just based on talking to some developers. I'm not saying this is true of every game but a lot of AAA games that I've been in knowledge of development sometimes they get less than three months to polish a game and that's often not even close to enough QA time, development time to really patch up some of the major bugs and then you end up launching a game that's just fundamentally broken whereas then you have Tears of the Kingdom come out and it's using all these brilliant, brilliantly hard to code development sequences and everything just works and you're leaving other AAA developers going how the hell did they pull this up? Well, because they were given the proper time to do it and I know there's that infamous quote that may or may not be from Shigeru Miyamoto about delayed games, eventually being good we all know that that's not true either but it's interesting. I'm just thinking about Tears of the Kingdom in the context that it was just given the proper time to do it right and I gotta give Nintendo Kudo for that because yeah, they could have dropped it last year it might have had some bugs. Heck, it could have been last holiday it might have had some more bugs but they really took advantage of that development time to create a super polished game and yeah, we know those glitches, duplication glitches and other stuff that make it in there they'll always be glitches in games but those glitches are triggered typically intentionally and aren't as easy to trigger by accident. So you guys are awesome I wanna thank you so much for being here let me know what you think about today's Zelda news I guess at this point we're getting Zelda news almost daily from various interviews and other places and we'll see what tomorrow brings what I can say is we will be live streaming the PlayStation showcase that's happening on Wednesday so you can look forward to that as we keep up the date with everything happening in the world of Sony yes we are a Nintendo YouTube channel but we always end up live streaming all of the Sony events, all of the Xbox events all that stuff because we do like to keep up to date with everything going on while we have our biases for Nintendo I am a gamer on the whole that enjoys everything and I feel like even if you're not one of those people and you only play Switch and Nintendo games that it's still good to keep up on what's going on in the rest of the industry just for a piece of my take hey what is going on because who knows maybe there's something that would interest you that you wouldn't otherwise know about if you weren't paying attention see you guys for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video