When asked why, if digital is such an essential part of Nintendo’s plan, Wii U’s largest built-in storage solution is 32GB (internal flash memory), an amount that can quickly get used up, Reggie responded with the argument that paying for an external hard drive not only gives the consumer more freedom, but it can also be cheaper.

Fils-Aime: “We believe it’s important to provide a value to the consumer,” Fils-Aime explained. “[Memory] gets cheaper, right? Minute by minute, day by day. And so why lock the consumer into some high price point just because it happens to have 120 gigs of memory? Our mentality is, let’s sell a system that has enough memory to get you going, and then if you love digital downloads and you want to keep downloading content, buy a separate external hard drive. The price of it today is a hell of a lot cheaper than it was six months ago. And that’s a value benefit that the consumer should enjoy. It’s a different mentality than our competitors, but I’ll tell you, ours is much more consumer-oriented given the reduction in ongoing price, of the cost of memory.”

Fils-Aime says he expects digital downloads to continue to increase in popularity among Nintendo consumers.