3 years ago. Things are different now. I bought a 32 GB SD card for $30 for my 3DS.
I'm sorry, but was
that supposed to be disagreeing with me?
Now, even with low included memory, do you honestly think Nintendo would continue putting a low limit on downloadable titles?
Yes, I do. All the platform-holders have file size caps of some sort. They just tend to be so high that we never hear developers complain about it.
Doing the math, actually, Nintendo infamously had a 40 MB cap on downloads for (according to Wikipedia) the Wii's 512 MB of flash memory. That's 7.8% of the total space. If Nintendo follows this trend, I estimate their cap would be somewhere around 625 MB on the Wii U.
Nintendo has done stupid things in the past
And judging by this week, they're prepared to do plenty of stupid things
now. Yeah yeah...I know. Cheap shot. But this just seems like the same Nintendo we had with the Wii years. They put on the pretense of change, but then make the same mistakes.
8 GB will be fine for some people and should hold several games, especially since many games don't max out their storage medium at all.
OK, let's put this in context a bit. The
average size of the downloadable games I buy these days on my PS3 is roughly around 1.2 GB in size. Yesterday, I downloaded my PS+ freebie "Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One" PS3 retail title, and it was 14 GB in size. The
average size of my PS3 downloadable retail titles is about 4-6 GB. And most on-disc titles on my PS3 take up at least a couple of Gigs of space when they install, though considering installing is optional on the 360 it will probably be here as well.
So no, you won't be downloading retail titles with this incredibly low amount of storage.