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Carts will always sell more than disc copies of AC, here's why...

pika62221

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How many people have multiple copies of New Leaf? Quite a few. How many have multiple copies of City Folk. Wii outsold the 3DS by a large margin, so there should have been multiple copies of City Folk bought by the same people to have multiple towns. They can't! Why? Because they need multiple Wii's to have multiple towns, unlike the 3DS cartridges where the town is saved on the cartridge.

A little history. In the N64 days, the towns were saved to the cartridge, and if you wanted to travel, the memory pak was used to put your travel data on, and you'd swap cartridges. Sound similar to that of GameCube and its memory cards? Kind of, your town was on one memory card, a travel data on the other, and you swapped memory cards. For multiple towns, you only needed multiple memory cards as the GameCube prevented you from copying AC town data to another card. However, on the N64, you needed 2 game paks for 2 towns. Fast forward to the DS, and the same thing like the N64 where if you wanted multiple towns, you had to buy multiple game paks. The Wii made things worse than GameCube as it stored the town data on the Wii itself, and unless you hacked it or something, couldn't copy your town to the SD card. So, if you wanted 2 towns on the Wii, you had to buy a second Wii, not a second copy of the game! For New Leaf, it was exactly the same as Wild World where to have 2 or more towns, you just needed 2 or more game paks. See?

THIS is why cartridges will be the higher sold version for the series, and Switch, a fully portable system on its own, uses cartridges, so my bet is that it'll outsell New Leaf AND Wild World to be the highest in the series as it'll have all the benefits every prior iteration had as you can play it at home on the television, and continue to play it on the system while travelling, and still have multiple towns with multiple cartridges, as unlike discs, carts allow you to save on them.

This also negates one of the arguments I saw as to which version was better, home or portable, and one said home, because if anything happened to the game, they could replace it, and continue on with their town, but that isn't a home vs console argument as it is a cartridge vs disc argument as PSP uses discs and is a portable, and has the same benefit if something happened to the disc you could replace it, and all your saved data remains.
 
Tbh I prefer cartridges because I like having extra space on my SD card and don't like the idea of running out. Plus, two DSes.

But good points. xD
 
Two points worth making:

1) I don't know that there are a great many buying multiple carts. I suspect the overwhelming majority are satisfied with one copy. I'm not sure where to find such information, however.

2) As far as the future is concerned, Nintendo Switch carts are read-only. Nintendo has said all save data (as well as updates and downloadable content) for Switch games will be stored on the system. There could still be some other method of creating multiple save files for a game (we don't know), but this will not be done with multiple carts on the Switch.
 
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Nintendo Switch also sports cartridges/carts. But to the extent of our current knowledge of the situation right now, we think saving to carts isn't in the plans for the new Nintendo console since it sports onboard memory (32 GB) and a SD Memory card slot. So even though the next Animal Crossing game might be on a cart, it might not be possible to have multiple towns ? la 3DS...
 
japan is the prominent buyer of the portable games, and they have a huge video game market, which improves the cartridge's selling point. plus, a disc doesn't store the save data, so it isn't as easily transportable.
 
The reason why I played New Leaf more than City Folk was because I preferred Animal Crossing on the go. As well, the controls were harder on the Wii version than 3DS, not because New Leaf is a cart.
 
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