Taiwanese firm Macronix, which manufactures the ROM chips in your DS carts, will support game sizes ranging from 1GB to 8GB* for the Nintendo 3DS, according to a report from Gamrade (some questionable site I’m not too familiar with, though they posted those scans of 3DS titles we featured two days ago).

So, if this is true, how does it compare to current DS game sizes? Ni no Kuni and Love Plus+, two of the biggest DS games in terms of file size, weight in at 512MB. Smaller and simpler retail games can be as small as 32MB.

With all that room, developers can potentially go buck wild with their assets, cramming in hojillions of polygons, days worth of CD-quality audio, and hours of cutscenes, just like we’ve always wanted in a portable game…

Presumably, this won’t matter so much for smaller studios, as paying for a run of 8GB carts (100 percent upfront!) just won’t be possible with their budgets.

If Nintendo manages to create an indie-friendly setup with the 3DS’s Shopping Channel – doubtful, but that’s what it needs to do to rival the App Store – perhaps that’s where developers will release their lower budget, experimental, and niche titles that don’t call for a 1GB to 8GB cart.

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See also: More Nintendo 3DS news and media

*The site specifically says 8GB and not 8Gbit (1GB). At E3 earlier this year, Nintendo promised a max game size of at least 2GB.

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