Learning about Japan's gaming scene in the 1980s is a bit of a culture shock, if you are unfamiliar with it. The sentence "gamers felt prices were too high and had no alternatives, as game rental had been made illegal just the year prior" is a factual statement. The Recording Industry Association of Japan, alongside the Compact Disc & Video Rental Commerce Trade Association had lobbied the government to ban rentals on software as rental stores would crack the copy protection to produce extra copies to rent out. Obviously, the software companies wanted to ensure they made the money, and the recording industry will shut down any attempt at people making copies in the name of dear sweet Capitalism, so renting became illegal in 1983 and still is to this day.
It's 1984, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and the Famicom has been on a hot streak for over a year. Because of the success of microcomputers in Europe and Asia, America's infamous video game crash did little to impact the games industry overseas, and this meant that Nintendo's Family Computer was doing phenomenally well. It had its issues over the other computers at the time though, for sure: for starters, its ROMs were puny compared to that of contemporary PCs. The 3.5" floppy disk could store 360 kilobytes per side at this point, the equivalent of at least nine Famicom game ROMs. The 40 Kibibyte ROM size was limiting for developers, and this was when Hudson approached Nintendo.
The Bee Card, a data format used sparsely on the MSX and Atari Portfolio computer systems, was looking to expand to new computer systems, and Nintendo seemed the right direction for the format. The 128 kilobit storage was nowhere near as impressive as it sounds, being just 16 kilobytes, or less than half the size of a Famicom ROM, but the ability for players to overwrite the card with new game data excited Nintendo and led to the production of the floppy-based Famicom Disk System.
The conceit was simple: players would buy the disk drive, attach it to the Famicom, and then in lieu of the 40KiB cartridges would use 112KB 3" Mitsumi Quick Disk floppies, allowing for games roughly triple the size of the old cartridges. Nintendo's marketing at the time made it clear that their latest games would only be available on the Famicom Disk System, facilitating families to buy the ¥15,000 ($~80 USD then, the equivalent of $233 today) to get the newest games. The disks would be cheaper, but they were also rewriteable, which ultimately meant a family would need to buy new blank media or double-dip in buying games.
For what it's worth, one blank disk could hold two games, and writing a new title to a disk cost just the equivalent of a few dollars, with an entirely new disk costing roughly $11 USD at the time, or ¥2,000. The issue though becomes instead of owning a cartridge of The Legend of Zelda which would contain that game until the chips or contacts wore out, you had significantly more fragile media that could be overwritten with anything as accidental as a magnet or as deliberate as a sibling wanting to play Vollyball instead of Metroid. They were prone to read errors, and the lack of a shutter and soft fabric on the inside to catch dust meant that if you lost the plastic case and wax paper sleeve, the disk would die, given a matter of time.
The Disk reader also required six C-cell batteries if you didn't have a spare AC adapter and space to plug it in, which is just the cherry on top.
Ultimately, the Disk System failed to catch on and was never released in the US, in part due to Capcom's Ghosts 'n Goblins coming on a 120 KB cartridge that allowed for banks of ROM memory to be swapped in to expand the graphical and size limitations, in part because piracy on the disk was surprisingly easy despite "NINTENDO" being pressed into every disk and requiring matching stamps inside the reader to fit (the offered solution was just to cut into the plastic casing of a Mitsumi Quick Disk), and in part because of copyright ownership, as you see, unlike on a cartridge, Nintendo would own 50% copyright ownership of your property if you released it on the Famicom Disk System.
...That sucks!!
Nintendo has banked on NES nostalgia pretty much as early as they could, and Diskun and the Disk System read jingle makes occasional appearances in games of theirs. They love this era dearly, and given their still draconian practices, like preventing hacks on now-discontinued, no-longer-supported hardware to whatever the fuck they've done to Gary Bowser, it should be no surprise that Nintendo looks back so fondly on an era where you might need to rebuy Zelda over and over because you wanted to play other games on your Disk system.
Yes, Nintendo has always effectively been the Disney of gaming. It's not spoken of as much these days, but Nintendo once ran the US console industry like the mob, preventing other companies from putting their consoles on major retailers' shelves. If you've ever wondered why you never heard of consoles like the Sega Master System or the TurboGrafx, that's why. This stranglehold would last from the start of the NES up until the very early 90s, and it's a miracle Sega was able to make any headway into the US with the Genesis.1
So remember kids: you can commit the worst crimes if you have a handful of marketable characters!
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Coincidentally, 90s Sega is the whole reason Nintendo was saddled with the reputation of being the "kiddie, family friendly company," something I've been told still aggravates Nintendo to this very day.