Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime says digital downloads may complement the business model for its new storage-centric handheld DSi, but they won't overtake retail sales. That's a big fat "aww shucks" for those of you hoping not to have to mobilize yourself to stroll on down to the local retailer to feed your, err, mobile handheld.
Curiously, the guy some people call the "Regginator" thinks customers "will want an experience that's best delivered through physical goods." At least that's what he told Venture Beat's Dean Takahasi in an interview posted yesterday.
I'd hate to try to second guess Nintendo, and granted it's all going to depend on the size of the DSi's internal flash memory, but I'm not so sure I agree that the sort of consumer demographic buying the DSi (young and even younger) is still saddled with all that older generational "gotta have a hard copy or I'm gonna freak out" baggage. Heck, the DS's games are a pain as-is. They're hard to handle, easy to lose, and tiny enough that I don't know they rightly even count as Fils-Aime's "physical goods," unless he means the case and manual, to which this Gen X'er says "good riddance." I've been hauling my game stash around sans manuals and cases in the very same Case Logic carrier for nearly a decade. Nothing would thrill me more than ditching the hunk of vinyl, too.
Too bad the DSi won't come with some sort of standard-sized flash memory slot (it'll all be internal, presumably to deter casual pirates). I just bought a 2GB Sandisk SD card for my aging Canon PowerShot SD110--goodbye 16MB thirty-some picture coffin, hello 2GB three-thousand picture mega-stadium. Cost? A little less than three bucks.
