Every release the studio ships digitally within minutes of launch, worldwide, at effectively no marginal cost. It also, every time, manufactures a limited run of physical cartridges that take weeks to produce and cost far more to make than to sell.
The studio's founder describes the cartridges as a deliberate inefficiency — proof that a game exists as a physical object, not just a license tied to an account that could vanish if a storefront ever shuts down.
Manufacturing something that doesn't need to exist
Collectors who buy the cartridges rarely play them on the original hardware; most already own the digital version and play that instead. The cartridge functions more as an artifact — proof of ownership in a format nobody can revoke remotely.
The studio loses money on every cartridge run, subsidized by digital sales. Its founder says that's fine: the cartridges were never meant to be the business, just a hedge against a future where digital ownership means less than it used to.