 So today we're going to talk about something that isn't necessarily Nintendo-based, but we're going to apply the potential effects of it to Nintendo because they are part of the gaming industry and Down the line. This could be something that affects them now this comes from take two interactive president Carl Slatoff and he had this to say in regards to the future of video game delivery and Obviously had to touch a little bit on loot boxes given that that is currently a ongoing issue that has started to get legal repercussions So let's just go into what he had to say and he said this in interview over at game industry abiz I think over the long term it will be 100% digital take two interactive president Carl Slatoff says I can't predict whether it's five years ten years or 20 years It's probably less than 20 and maybe more than five, but I think it ultimately gets there That's the zeitgeist things are moving in that direction and obviously here. He's talking about How games are going to be delivered in the future versus physical versus digital Beyond that he also goes into the loot box thing and how people are calling it gambling as take two has their own Microtransactionists to this some of their games specifically with like WWE and NBA 2k etc And it says the whole gambling regulator thing We don't view that sort of thing as gambling our view of it is the same as the ESA statement for the most part That's going to play its course But in terms of the consumer and the noise you hear in the market right now, it's all about content It's all about over delivering on content and making sure you're focused on engagement That has been our strategy and where we're focused as long as you keep your eye on the ball You're going to be okay. The consumer is going to be really happy with what they get He added you can't force the consumers to do anything You try to do your best to create the best experience you possibly can to drive engagement and driving engagement creates value in entertainment That's how it's always been and how it always will be now on his last point. He's not exactly wrong If you're not engaging in the use of a product if you're not enjoying your useful product You have a really really low value of that product in your life as an example when I played Superman 64 back in the day I was all excited for that game and the Engagement level of it was low. I stopped playing the game after an hour. I didn't get any enjoyment out of it I felt like I wasted my money and my entertainment value in that was extremely low, of course When you see words like driving engagement and creates value in entertainment I mean directly after talking about how things like loot boxes and micro transactions are not gambling It's it's a very interesting stance because clearly that's not how it's always been there hasn't always been micro transactions There hasn't always been loot boxes and that hasn't always been a Driving factor for entertainment today Video game be gaming has changed in this sense and that before it was all about here's an experience Here's a game you play it until you complete it and then you're done Whereas today it's all about keeping users engaged in your product over the long haul So you play Grand Theft Auto 5 you get to the end of it You've done everything in the game that you really feel like doing and you and you just want to be done Playing well Here's a multiplayer mode that just keeps you playing the game over and over again for years to come and This is what's been happening With the advent of online multiplayer is that people are using multiplayer aspects of games to keep players Engaged for a longer period of time Ironically enough this hasn't actually led to games having a longer shelf life Which should be the point of it to me at the point of video games if you're going to Extrapolate them into having a longer engagement session is that those games should be on the shelf longer as an example Call of Duty with a multiplayer Why is Call of Duty still coming out every year when you can engage your fans for years with a single game? Then releasing a brand new one every year I never really understood why gaming is still trending towards releasing the games as fast as they can But trying to engage users the entire time It's just maybe it's just me and maybe that's just you know a small sample size of games But I want to extrapolate some of this into its effects on Nintendo because this is obviously a big name Take two rock star etc. They're basically Almost not quite all the way in on switch, but they they're definitely excited about switch They they have some games coming to switch or already released on switch some quality games I mean even NBA 2k 18 after it's been patched a bunch of times by now on switch is a quality experience And it's something I would recommend to people who want to play NBA games, especially on the go now the thing here is We have a couple points to adjust first off it is the digital future and that's why I'm gonna focus this video primarily on because it's hard to take anything take two says about micro transactions and loot boxes Seriously, because of course they're not gonna view it as gambling because that would hurt them as a company So while I think what they're saying is completely asinine on that front I don't think there's anything more to say than that they make a ton of money off micro transactions They're not gonna say anything that negatively impacts that so yeah, this is the expected response from them It'd be weird for a company that makes so much money of micro transactions to turn around and be like yeah But they're a form of gambling because that just hurts them so it is what it is, but That's what we're gonna focus here on this first part the digital future of video games I think for a long time a lot of people have been saying that video games are gonna go all digital and It's been an interesting prospect because that hasn't exactly happened in fact We've seen in certain cases a reinvigoration of a physical product Some of this is with those special editions the explorers edition for Breath of the Wild Pack-ins and all this stuff, but we've also seen you know like Nintendo when you buy the Super Mario Odyssey bundle The the switch bundle with the red joy-cons you get a digital copy of the game And they've been doing that with 3ds for a long time as well It's been a very interesting prospect to see the growth in digital sales And when digital sales are not only going to be more popular than physical sales But eventually be the de facto way games are delivered and that physical sales just don't exist anymore and it's interesting to feel like that's going to be the future and It's interesting because it's already the way it is on PC. It's been that way in PC forever Most PCs you buy today or build or any enthusiast PC you see out there They don't have disc drives anymore We don't buy discs off a shelf and install them and even if I went to Walmart and got a really really good sale Let's say I was able to pick up Civilization 6 for 10 bucks at Walmart I couldn't do that. I was actually was looking for the Black Friday for 10 bucks But couldn't find it let's say but I could buy it at Walmart for 10 bucks I don't even need to put those discs in my computer. I could just grab the code Registered on steam and download the game. So it's Even when you buy a physical medium, you could still use it as a digital one for PCs This isn't the case on consoles yet You know, you can't go buy a copy of breath of the wild physical and then download a digital version It just doesn't work that way. So Here's my stance on all of that. I Feel like it is of extreme consumer benefit That we live in a digital future in so much that the physical medium doesn't need to go away But in so much that devices Specifically cater to that type of future as an example And I'm going to bring up Nintendo in this because I want to tie Nintendo into this digital future The switch is not a device really built that well for a digital future Not because it doesn't offer a cheap way to expand the memory Of course it does micro SD cards great that decision. I'm glad Nintendo supports that but because the system itself Doesn't support the type of hard drive space Necessary for an all-digital future if you're going to have an all-digital future The device itself needs to support such a notion and while the switch offers the right kind of Ability to expand your storage the base storage should be much larger. There is almost no reason There shouldn't be at least a hundred and twenty eight gigabytes of internal storage on switch If not, I'll heck up a lot more than that But I think feel like 128 would have been a nice a nice sacrifice Considering the size of Nintendo games aren't necessarily as huge But again, we're left in this conundrum where if you want to go all digital on switch You're gonna have to buy micro SD cards potentially several of them in addition to your purchase Whereas with like an Xbox one X even I know one terabyte is still quite kind of small You could still install around 10 games or so Whereas with switch you might install one game and then that's it or in some games cases You might not even have enough space on your internal memory to install that one game So yeah, it's kind of just a big mess in my opinion So what can we do about this? How can we fix this? What what what is the future of digital games? Why is the future digital games? Obviously until internet is available worldwide physical games are going to exist As long as people want to collect physical games because I want to hold I want to collect the entire physical library for switch But I'm going to tell you something right now and this is something that I didn't really realize I didn't like until um until switch It's interesting because I've been PC gaming a long time But on switch I really like the convenience of just selecting my game on the menu and playing the game I don't like especially since I do a lot of recording a lot of local recording My switch is wall mounted. So I don't necessarily have the dock and the switch right next to me I always have to stand up and take the switch out and take out the cartridge change the cartridge I have a a little four cartridge holder here. I have five physical game cartridges for switch right now Um and they're big games. They're games that I want to play all the time. So I have to switch I have to you know swap out the cartridges a lot. You know, let me just open this up here I've got you know one to switch, you know, maybe that's the one I play the least of but I really enjoy it But I'm always switching out arms doom odyssey and zelda I have to switch out those cartridges non-stop and I'm going to tell you because of that I purposely play other games in the system a lot more my fire on the warriors I got zeno blade chronicles two coming up. I have a digital version of that The snipper clips and I'm trying to even remember my other digital games off the top of my head that I play all the time Splatoon 2 that's another one I'm constantly playing these digital games more because not because I necessarily would if I had these games installed But because that's convenient There's a massive convenience factor to having games digitally and there's always been a convenience factor But it's never been more apparent to me than with this portable home console device Where I'm playing home console quality games and I could just not switch out cartridges to enjoy them And there's always the fear I have this inherent fear that when I'm on an airplane When I get out my cartridges that I'm going to drop one Or several hopefully just one And then if I drop one and it doesn't land on my lap and it goes all the way to the floor It could get kicked around it could end up somewhere where I lose it These cartridges are small and that's not I mean the cartridges should be small. That's fine But it's just an inherent fear I have Because I have you know, I drop things sometimes. I think we all drop things sometimes maybe not game cartridges I personally haven't dropped a game cartridge yet Just in my office, but on a plane, you know some turbulence hits something happens in a car ride on a bus Train whatever there's a lot of subway I mean there's a lot of ways that you might drop a physical cartridge You could say well, don't change your physical cartridge out in the middle of a flight or in the middle of that Okay, so now you're saying that You're just admitting it's more convenient for me to use digital games because then I don't have to switch out a cartridge Uh, I don't have to be stuck to a single game the whole way. So I see the massive convenience in digital. I feel like I don't know if in my lifetime I'm I figure I am 31 right now. I've probably got another 20 to 30 years of uh gaming left in me Uh, maybe another 50 60 years of being alive left Uh, and when I say gaming left to me, it doesn't mean I'm not gonna play games when I'm old But it means I understand that there's going to be a point in my life when I'm so old that my ability to game Begins to dig a great To not be as viable as it once was either it's because of my eyesight or because of arthritis or whatever ends up Whatever whatever ends up kicking my butt. It makes me not a big gamer, you know, 30 years from now But when I think about Where gaming is heading I think digital makes a lot of sense I think physical is always going to exist in some form It just might no longer be a primary method of delivery Which could mean new places like gamestop don't exist anymore or they all become like Think geek stars which are just gaming merchandise or nerd merchandise Um, maybe they bring comics back or whatever the case may be not that comics ever went away But you know what I mean start start making a more mainstream again to have his physical comics And they still have games but just not, you know, huge shells full of them Uh, I don't know. I think that's kind of the future for gamestop if they want to stay viable, but it's It's just interesting to me to think about this all digital future Because I kind of want it as much as I've always been an advocate for physical games I'm slowly starting to come I guess through the dark side And maybe it shouldn't be surprising considering that I'm also a pc gamer and it's all digital there But it just it's so convenient all we need now Our devices that realize this convenience and give us the amount of storage That we really should have like PlayStation 4 PlayStation 4 pro and the xbox 1x they should come with like multiple terabytes worth of storage out the gate So they're not even fully ready for this all digital future The switch should come with 128 to if not 500 gigs worth of storage internally, but it doesn't This is a future that until devices start offering that kind of storage Physical still going to be highly viable. Why do I even have all these physical games? Because I don't want to Keep buying sd cards if I literally went straight digital on switch I would need to own multiple sd cards even if I had a 256 gigabyte Card in there or off even a 400 gigabyte Maybe I wouldn't have the 400 gigabyte full right now But I would be over 300 gigabytes worth of installs if I had all of my physical games and all of my All my physical games as digital products So it's a problem and I do I do realize it's a first world problem Not all of you guys own as many switch games as I do right, you know, I own 16 17 switch games A lot of you guys might only own one or two So this isn't even you know a problem that's going to be there for everyone But if we're going to hit that all digital future 5 10 20 years from now It's going to start when products like playstations and xboxes and nintendo switches start offering enough storage out the gate to support such a thing until that happens Despite all the expandability in the world out there, you know the external hard drives you can hook up to xbox one x's and stuff It's not going to exactly be 100 viable Until we reach that point. I don't know you guys let me know what you think about a potential all digital future In the comments below and about 2k's comments on all this and if you think they're right if you think they're wrong Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we're we're we're gonna end up seeing the shift back to the physical medium Um, I don't know you guys let me know what you think in the comments below I am Nathaniel Ruppeljantz from nintendo prime and if you like this video, you know what to do And if you dislike this video hit that dislike button subscribe Content and I'll catch you in the next one