Yes, well, as I said for years during the growth of digital, even when it was just arriving, that this was going to be a problem. In general big business never actually delivers on lower prices when they promise it. Half the point of going to a digital format was that is was going to save us all a ton of money and reduce the price of games by a crazy amount. This was supposed to be "our" benefit as consumers for the amount of control the companies would then have over the content. Of course with no safeguards, and a lack of customer foresight, we pretty much had the control of our products taken away from us, and we're being charged the same thing we always were, albeit that now includes a higher margin of profit due to the expenses being cut out.
Basically Nintendo's attitude is that since they have you by the nuts, they have no real reason to cut you a deal. You either pay what they ask for, or you go without.
That said, on the surface there is a legimate issue here, if Nintendo plans to continue producing hard copy media they do not want to wind up with a situation where they have a bunch of carts they simply can't sell because people buy nothing but digital when the price difference is that vast. In general Nintendo's audience includes a lot of kids whose parents might not want them to have a ton of digital access, and prefer them to do as much as possible with physical media, that way there are no concerns about them buying things unexpectedly through the online stores, being stalked through a connection, or whatever else parents might be concerned about nowadays (real or imagined). It could create an awkward situation if such a consumer asks why they should pay 10x the digital price for a cart.... I mean I sort of see what he's saying, but honestly I don't think that's an excuse for keeping the prices on the digital content that high, I mean it makes the most sense to simply explain about the cart costs and lower the digital prices... well unless your greedy in which case your attitude is: "we want to keep our brand name value high, people have shown they will pay this for one of our games, so that is what we will charge even as we reduce costs because you know we can".
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On a side issue I think we do need to see more attention being paid to digital business in order to protect consumers, both in terms of ensuring the rights of a purchaser to the product they buy, and also to ensure that the content remain available in perpetuity. Basically if something is sold digitally the people involved (not just their corporate identity) should be held responsible for ensuring that content remains available until the stars go cold. Already we're seeing issues with people losing virtual property and such on MMOs that go out of business or shut down. I'm of the opinion that anything sold digitally should need to be backed by a trust put in place to ensure it's continued existence. That way if say someone wants to play an MMO in 30 years while in the old age home, they should be able to
do it and access any and all content they paid for decades ago given access to the needed hardware. A company retiring a product, or even disappearing, should be no excuse. A trust fund is basically a large pile of money that generates a constant stream of interest, that interest can be drawn upon to be used for a stated task. Some rich people set up trusts for their kids so they will never have to go without money, and won't be able to just squander a fortune while they are young. In the case of digital property, associated trust would exist to generate money to ensure the perpetual operation of game servers and someone to watch them/maintain them at least part time separate from the company, even if nobody continues to expand, or even use the game, or whatever the property in question is. Done correctly you could pretty much keep any virtual item/property alive pretty much limitlessly even after the technology involved became totally obsolete. Such a trust should need to be established per product as part of a development budget. When your already seeing tens of millions of dollars spent on video game development and god knows how much profit that is generating, putting aside a million or so for each product to set up a trust sufficient to keep a server running off the interest is quite doable... and frankly could probably be covered by the money being saved in packaging, shipping, etc... for a lot of products to begin with. Such in my opinion at least.
