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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My wife got me a copy of Mass effect Andromeda as a gift once. She bought the physical copy (or so she thought) since that makes a better gift. When I opened the case, there was literally nothing in there but a code for EA Origin on a sticker.
Ea games are awful for this. I bought sims 4 when it first came out and had the same issue. It's so cool that I can't own games even if I try to buy the physical copy. I'm just glad that other companies haven't been doing digital only hard copies.
I mean, do you even have a bluray drive on your PC? That's why they do it, I remember having the option to buy San Andreas on one dvd or 8 cds or something, precisely because people don't often replace their drives.
The height of new game glory for me were the old school huge boxes PC games came in. It wasn't uncommon to get a thick manual with wonderful art, sometimes spiral bound, maps, other neat add-ins. Even console games had nice manuals with useful information you may not otherwise know. I miss that stuff.
I wrote a similar reply to a higher comment without seeing yours, and I completely agree - I miss it.
I was a bit younger in the 90s and half the magic of the ride home was reading the manual so you could hit the ground running when you installed it/put the cartridge in/loaded the tape.
If anyone is old enough to remember Infocom games, they came with "feelies," just random fun stuff related to the game they decided to include. It occasionally was needed to solve a game puzzle, but usually not.
I can still smell that box. They had a certain smell back then.
When people talk about games having heart, this is it. Little unnecessary goodies just because you're excited that people are buying your game and you want them to be into it.
Yeah, as Godort said, some games do come with manuals. The Knights of the Old Republic (the first one) port to the Switch is one example. (Presumably KOTOR II as well.)
Tell me what console or system or even game manufacturer that lets you buy their game, download it to a portable micro SD and then lets you play it from there.
Not even steam lets you do that and you don't even have a direct way of knowing what's on the micro SD card without making a label for it which good luck.
No steam is definitely not the bastion to use as they really aren't gonna work. They like games tied to accounts.
You could say GOG games but it really still defeats the point of it not being even close to similar to a physical game you could resell and having a nicely labeled piece of physical media.
I know you aren't the person originally with the really bad argument btw, but yeah the list is super small this would work for.
Sadly, yes. Got a switch for Xmas this year. Went and bought a mario game, and was completely taken aback when the inside of the case looked just like this. I sat there totally feeling this exact post.
The map in GTA3. There was a mission towards the end of the game I kept failing; to deliver a corrupt FBI agent to the airport. Eventually I realised, after studying the map, I could bypass all the road blocks by taking the light rail system. I felt like an 11 year old Einstein.
Is that the timed mission where they posted up enemies everywhere with rocket launchers along the normal route? That mission ended my last attempt at a playthrough, still never finished GTA3
conpanies usually either bake it into the game as tutorials or have digital manuals nowadays. it was always about cutting physical sales cost (as the physical media itself has a cost attached to it)
IDK how it works on the current console devices, but on the yhe previous generation, the wiiu for example would give the player the option to open the digital manual when the game is launched by pressing the home button and selecting the manual. one of yhe pros is that the manuals digitally tend to be more complete and not rushed to save on cost. take for example, the Xenoblade Chronicle X manual is 142 pages long, something that would basically never exist physically.
Yes, because who wants to own their shit when they can just perpetually lease it with the unending dread of losing it all at any moment (digital platform of choice) shuts down or just says fuck you, we're taking the games away and you cant do shit about it.
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.
But without those big-ass cases, there wouldn't be a market for these.
I miss cardboard game boxes
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.
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..
My wife got me a copy of Mass effect Andromeda as a gift once. She bought the physical copy (or so she thought) since that makes a better gift. When I opened the case, there was literally nothing in there but a code for EA Origin on a sticker.
Ea games are awful for this. I bought sims 4 when it first came out and had the same issue. It's so cool that I can't own games even if I try to buy the physical copy. I'm just glad that other companies haven't been doing digital only hard copies.
They literally sold you plastic trash that could have been a man email 🤦♂️
I mean, do you even have a bluray drive on your PC? That's why they do it, I remember having the option to buy San Andreas on one dvd or 8 cds or something, precisely because people don't often replace their drives.
I haven't had a disc drive of any sort on my PC for over a decade
They can sell codes in stores all they want. But.... print them on a nice greeting card or something instead of using about 100g of ABS plastic?
The height of new game glory for me were the old school huge boxes PC games came in. It wasn't uncommon to get a thick manual with wonderful art, sometimes spiral bound, maps, other neat add-ins. Even console games had nice manuals with useful information you may not otherwise know. I miss that stuff.
I collapsed and recycled all of my large PC game boxes out of necessary, but I have every single manual/map/pack-in though!
I wrote a similar reply to a higher comment without seeing yours, and I completely agree - I miss it.
I was a bit younger in the 90s and half the magic of the ride home was reading the manual so you could hit the ground running when you installed it/put the cartridge in/loaded the tape.
Way back in the day places like Working Designs sent Lunar and Lunar 2 out with badass merch and maps. They were amazing.
I very distinctly remember pouring over the City of Heroes art book/manual they shipped with that game.
Man I loved that game. So fun.
If anyone is old enough to remember Infocom games, they came with "feelies," just random fun stuff related to the game they decided to include. It occasionally was needed to solve a game puzzle, but usually not.
I can still smell that box. They had a certain smell back then.
When people talk about games having heart, this is it. Little unnecessary goodies just because you're excited that people are buying your game and you want them to be into it.
Getting a new game and having books and stickers to mess with on the ride home until you can play the game.
“Kids these days” will never know that feeling. Of course, they’ll have their ipads, so probably won’t care.
Myst and Riven had the greatest boxes! Then also The 11th Hour and Phantasmagoria.
Why are there clips for a manual yet never a manual or even an info card? Seems like this started in the PS3/360/Wii generation.
Some games come with an insert or a manual, but it's rare.
And it's cheaper to have only one case design rather than two
Yeah, as Godort said, some games do come with manuals. The Knights of the Old Republic (the first one) port to the Switch is one example. (Presumably KOTOR II as well.)
.. and cloth maps. And developer notes. And figurines. And trinkets from the lore. And the game costing under $20. And...
Still better than just a code 😅
Tell me what console or system or even game manufacturer that lets you buy their game, download it to a portable micro SD and then lets you play it from there.
Not even steam lets you do that and you don't even have a direct way of knowing what's on the micro SD card without making a label for it which good luck.
That's like, your opinion, man.
Kerbal Space Programm - and I guess most non-DRM-games on Steam, as long as they keep all their stuff in the game dir.
No steam is definitely not the bastion to use as they really aren't gonna work. They like games tied to accounts.
You could say GOG games but it really still defeats the point of it not being even close to similar to a physical game you could resell and having a nicely labeled piece of physical media.
I know you aren't the person originally with the really bad argument btw, but yeah the list is super small this would work for.
There’s quite a lot, actually. Definitely not the norm, but not extremely rare either.
Sounds like a shitty way to play games ngl
Those booklets were more joy to little me on the car ride home than the game itself many a time.
Farming Simulator 2011 had a big map poster
Oh but I have Kingdome Come: Deliverance on like seven dvds
Be thankful there is still a case to open and a cartridge inside, for now at least.
Still sad to see, there’s no feeling like the anticipation that builds from reading a game manual on the car or bus ride home.
At least it has something in it, not just a piece of paper with an online download code...
They want you to feel that way, say "what's the point" and buy digital...
Physical I can sell again! Big advantage right there.
They don't like that part lol
Now you're on Nintendos list.
is this real? no way right?
For like a decade yes
Sadly, yes. Got a switch for Xmas this year. Went and bought a mario game, and was completely taken aback when the inside of the case looked just like this. I sat there totally feeling this exact post.
Untitled goose game was surprisingly the last game I bought that had a case full of swag.
Or a piece of cardboard with a code inside.
Best in box surprise you ever received? Anyone?
For me it was the cloth map and manual that came with Ultima 4 or something.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos came with a scratch-n-sniff card. If I recall correctly, you can't win the game without it.
The map in GTA3. There was a mission towards the end of the game I kept failing; to deliver a corrupt FBI agent to the airport. Eventually I realised, after studying the map, I could bypass all the road blocks by taking the light rail system. I felt like an 11 year old Einstein.
Is that the timed mission where they posted up enemies everywhere with rocket launchers along the normal route? That mission ended my last attempt at a playthrough, still never finished GTA3
That's the one, I think it's the 2nd to last mission.
It's why I stopped buying physical games, I'll just pirate everything if they take away my digital library.
You stopped buying physical copies of games because they stopped putting manuals in the box? How is that better?
At least sometimes they double-side print the cover, this is just lazy.
I'm estatic! Look a physical copy!
Me too, all of these automatics and the paddle shifters... It's not the same.
The lack of game manuals in game cases still makes me sad.
Are they trying to sell digital manuals? Or was it just about the $.10 per copy savings?
conpanies usually either bake it into the game as tutorials or have digital manuals nowadays. it was always about cutting physical sales cost (as the physical media itself has a cost attached to it)
IDK how it works on the current console devices, but on the yhe previous generation, the wiiu for example would give the player the option to open the digital manual when the game is launched by pressing the home button and selecting the manual. one of yhe pros is that the manuals digitally tend to be more complete and not rushed to save on cost. take for example, the Xenoblade Chronicle X manual is 142 pages long, something that would basically never exist physically.
it's penny pinching, some have soulless digital manuals.
Makes me sad too
Even better if it’s one of the games that can’t even fit on the cartridge.
You paid all that for my PlayStation memory card!
Technical Support: Your Mom
Harrasment Hotline: Her sisters
Return policy: Come to the swap meet and try to find me, Bitch!
Always funny to me to be reminded that in some countries game came with manuals.
Here it was always just a cartridge/disk. Possibly the reason the most popular NES game was Battle City instead of Super Mario Bros.
So much plastic. We need to go digital only already
Yes, because who wants to own their shit when they can just perpetually lease it with the unending dread of losing it all at any moment (digital platform of choice) shuts down or just says fuck you, we're taking the games away and you cant do shit about it.
DRM-free digital copies that can be backed up to personal storage so access cannot be revoked.
I didn't say you don't get to own it. Stop defending plastic which just ends up in the environment, slaughtering innocent animals.
Just back up your games to a HDD
and imagine how much pollution was created just for you to be a stupid cunt on the internet.
between you and physical games, I know which one I could surely go without.
Stop being so attached to plastic nerd