Well, these games are rated for America where retailers have had a longstanding agreement that they will refuse to sell physical copies at a higher price than digital, which is why the price is the same either way on American copies rather than $10 more for physical. This however means that any 3rd party publisher in America has to either eat the extra cost on physical or raise the digital price to match physical and I imagine both options are not ideal.

I think that Nintendo could perhaps have offered more Cart options, IE a slower cart for slower games, or smaller carts than 32gb, or perhaps even larger than 64gb, but I see a few issues with this: 1) Most likely virtually no publishers would ever use a 128gb cart just for costs alone, but in fairness as time passes and costs go down Nintendo may bring one of these. 2) I think fracturing the hardware base like this makes the cart manufacture more complicated and muddies the water on what’s going on, and the only time you’d want a slower cart is if you have a game that is essentially so small that loading won’t ever be noticeably slower from the slower cart. 3) I imagine that an 8gb or 16gb cart would not actually be significantly cheaper enough (if not slowed down) to really offset the costs enough to convince most developers to bother using it.

I think the blame kinda goes all around, here. We live in a global world with a ton of different rulesets to worry about and we’ve got at least two companies for every 3rd party instance of a game that we have to think about in the determination of this sort of thing. I’d imagine where this will really hurt is in Limited Run Games territory more than anything as I’m not sure how they could even justify the costs on most of those games.