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Will Game Cartridges Make a Comeback?
sk8pmp writes "With the cost of solid state memory going down, will we see the return of the game cartridge? Or will digital distribution reign supreme and transition our entertainment into the cloud? This editorial explores the beginnings of the cartridge vs. disc battle of the '90s and theorizes a second one in the future. 'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"? You pop the game into the top of the console, so the game is sticking out the top like in ye olden times, and you could see the sweet artwork on the front of the cartridge. The nostalgia is killing me!'"
Disc shaped plastic cartridges?
You mean those DVD thingies?
-- Terry
Blowing into a USB port just isn't the same.
I don't see how cartridges ever went out of style. Nintendo DS games come on cartridges. PSN on PSP downloads games to a Memory Stick PRO Duo. Wii downloads games to SD. And there are even still new NES games coming out, like Sivak's Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril and ProgAce's Bio Force Ape vs. Dur Butter.
I'd bet for net delivery (DRM or not)
I think the plastic disc is about as cheap as one is going to get when you talk about something to transfer data on.
Sounds like cartridges would be a good thing in AU, if this article is any indication of where property rights are going with respect to software.
Downloadable content is the future, not bits permanently etched into chips or optical disks.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Cart loaders make piracy insanely easy on the Nintendo DS.
If you have a system that reads from a proprietary disc format (as opposed to common one like DVD) then you make piracy a little more difficult.
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Blowing is a horribly inefficient way to clean cartridges. It's not much better than just pulling out the cartridge and reseating it, and over time, the humidity in your breath can make the problem worse by attracting more dust. If your console's cartridges don't have those idiotic tiny plastic teeth *cough*DS*cough*, use rubbing alcohol on a cotton swab instead. It's fairly close to the method used in the official NES cleaning kit.
If it means a end to scratched disks, next disk requests and load times I welcome our old overlords.
...for solid-state media, for my tastes. It has connotations of low capacities and clunky housings.
But it does bring up a good question - what's the next media format? Is Blu-Ray, DVD, and CD the last family of media formats (since they can all be read by BD devices) before we go to all-online distribution? I suspect that we're done with cheap universal physical media formats in the near future.
Music stores are pretty much on their last legs, as much as it pains me to admit that. When physical game software dries up (PC or console) It has the added supposed-benefit (to the software industry) of eliminating the second-hand software market, which is something the industry has been trying to quash for what, 20 years?
If the "cartridges" are just DRMified USB drives, then there's really not much (hardware) overhead in offering that as an option in addition to optical media, as the console likely already has a USB controller.
If anything, I'd expect any form of neo-cartridge to be more like SD cards.
Why don't you go get a Sega 16 if you are really caught up in the nostalgia of a cartridge. I for one am fine with the way things are going (optical disks or digital downloads to embedded storage). It's fast. It's easy. There's no time wasted blowing (the console). The future is here.
The medium switched to disks because they were cheaper to make, held more information, and worked. If cartridges take on these qualities, then there would be no reason to avoid them.
I imagine the best size for a cartridge game being the size of an old TurboGraphx 16 game (http://www.billandchristina.com/vgamecomp/images/collection5/ar/DSC01409%20%28Small%29.JPG via google). I think SSD drives would be well suited for this. However, small games like SD cards are lost too easy. Remember, the gamer with kids can heavily influence this particular section of the gaming industry.
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What's not "digital" about CDs, DVDs or flash memory?
Stick Men
here in new zealand the uptake of visa debit cards at all major banks for a very low fee will mean more people buying online, which will lead to game downloads instead of going down to the store. that is unless consoles decide downloads are a bad idea or hard drive sizes stay too small.
he who controls the spice controls the universe
I would like that.
Online "games on demand" services are the future. I'm not necessarily a fan of this but that is where everything is heading. It gives the Publishers/Distributors an unprecedented amount of control over the consumer and that is exactly what they want.
'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"?
Cartridges will result in somewhat lower load times, for sure, but the complete elimination? I highly doubt it - The terrains of games like Oblivion and Fallout still take massive amounts of time to render in memory, and then display on the screen...The bottleneck is not necessarily the time required to simply extract it off the DVD or Blu Ray disk it resides on.
As game creators push the limits further and further with the inevitable next generation of consoles, you'll find the limiting factor in how long it takes to get up-and-running has less and less to do with the choice of optical media vs. SSD.
I still play cartridge games now. Who wants to play Turtles in Time co-op?
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I will be happy to see anything that looks like a CDROM go away. They are far too easily damaged. Put games on a thumbdrive for all I care. I just want reliability from media.
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It can bring down the cost of a console, but unless the cost of the cartage is close to that of a 2 layer blue ray disk, its going to be hard to convince.
Still, if we have the technology to "stamp" rom cart's maybe we got something.
...physical media fro games is going nowhere at this point. As much as I like digital distribution when done right I don't believe Broadband is widespread enough to replace physical at this point. Especially when you consider some who have BB many times consider that their least important "utility" and don't always pay on time resulting in down times. It can be an also be and up and down with sketchy service in some areas as well. Going to complete digital distribution is a good way off in my opinion.
As we move further and further into the networked aspect of gaming, most games will probably all be available through digital download. No more disks, no more cartridges, just the huge SSD inside the console. Unless you count that as a cartridge... The only downfall I could see would be not letting your friends borrow your games anymore, but you might get a letter in the mail with a court date if you keep it up!
The ideal gaming platform would be one where not just the game but most of the electronics that have traditionally been in the console are also in the cartridge. Mass production of cartridges would keep that affordable to the end user. The console would effectively just be the power supply and monitor and controller interconnects.
This approach has many benefits including:
* New games could take full advantage of new hardware and general tech advances.
* Games hardware could be custom tailored for each game.
* Owners would never need to upgrade their base console.
* Cartridges would be practically impossible to pirate cost-effectively.
I'm already annoyed at the Netflix app for the Wii coming on disc instead of stored to the flash (word is it may be licensing issues; the app works spectacularly, by the way).
For really graphics intensive games, we'll still be seeing game sizes in the tens of gigabytes. Flash is cheap, but it isn't that cheap (nor is the cheap stuff particularly fast. SD card transfer speeds are pretty pathetic). For most games, I think there will at least be a download option, ala Steam. Instant gratification from your purchase, and it allows for smaller, cheaper games to become popular (World of Goo).
The physical disc does have a few advantages - you can bring it to a friend's house and easily re-sell it. Still, a really nice system would simply be an "export to USB drive/SD card" option which temporarily disables the game on the console and puts a valid copy on the USB key. The USB key's copy is valid for a fixed period of time. Sales could, in principle, be done via electronic transfer (though game publishers will be thrilled to cutoff the used game market if they can do it legally).
So I think we'll see the really big games continue to get distributed on optical media (it's cheap), and more games distributed both on optical media and download. Since this last generation of consoles, hard drives have gotten much, much larger and cheaper relative to average game size. The next gen consoles will almost certainly have 1-3 TB drives built into them, standard. But ROM cartridges or substantial use of flash cartridges? I'm not seeing it.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
It's funny to see people thinking in terms of Media. It's like reading the old science fiction (Niven, etc.) where they constantly refer to tapes and even have the characters writing things down (they have faster than light travel but no PDAs, right). The next popular media format is already here and making rapid inroads, it's called the Internet and it's available in high speed local wired flavours (you can get a home gigabit switch for $20-40 easy) and wireless (802.11 a/b/g/n, 3G, 4G, WiMax, etc.). I'm not saying physical media will go away (try downloading 50 gigs worth of anything on less than a local gigabit network is very painful), but wireless especially will take care of most of the low end (most people I know can now email around attachments of several megabytes in size with no problems).
As long as they don't come with those annoying "battery memory" thingies that went dead and then you couldn't save your game anymore. Man I hated that...
Ruined a perfectly good game of Might an Magic on my Genesis :(
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
cardboard soap box. I can't take seriously someone who doesn't understand the euphamism and is too lazy to look it up.
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As shown by Ea shutting down servers and my own experience with bioware games if you dont have a physical copy, (even if you do with always on drm) your games are doomed to stop working/ lose acess in about 3 years
I bought jade empire (and nwn dlc) about 3 years ago from the bioware store. You can still buy this game on steam and other services but the bioware store was "updated". They took down the nwn stuff when they became part of ea - no refund no way to get it if you hant got it backed up.
They also took down jade empire SE for those of us who baught it from their own store - with no warning and no explanation since. When I baught it there was no termination clause, infact it stated I could install 3 times with no problem then contact support for additional installs. I would have been on my second install.
I have pmailed writen on the furom etc and have had no response other than Ill ask X to look into it.
The cload may be cheaper for publichers it never will be for consumers. Physical copies are te only way to go for cnosumers. But publishers and devs wil love digital, they have a way to make us buy the game again in x number of years by just cutting acess, and no second hand market.
DS games are like a microSD format, and are tiny. I don't think we'll see a return to bulky Atari or NES-style game carts.
More likely, downloadable games will be the future anyway. And they'll be rented content, tied to servers, and DRMed to the point that you in no way actually own the game unless you're actively paying for it and you are bio-authenticated.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Cartridges are still mostly pointless.
Consider: If Flash is cheap enough to distribute games on, it is cheap enough to build large mass storage devices into consoles with. Further, since a console is a one-time purchase, and its internal mass storage is re-usable, while a catridge's Flash has to come right out of the margins of the game, it will always be the case, no matter how cheap Flash gets, that a console can have a much larger mass storage block than a cartridge can. Simple economic reality. Unless the singularity strikes, and the numbers are "Catridge: a million bazillion petabytes, too cheap to price" and "Console: a trillion bazillion petabytes, too cheap to price" this difference will always matter.
Cartridges don't really offer any anti-piracy advantage anymore: again, because you have to fit into the margin of the game being sold, you are pretty limited in what security measures you can bake into the cartridge itself. Clones will be pouring out of China and onto ebay within moments. Any moderately robust system-level DRM is going to be in the console. And, if optical media really scare you, it is still cheaper to come up with a slight variant(Blu-Ray disks with embedded RFIDs or something) than it is to ship a cartridge. Downloads, of course, offer trivial per-download uniqueness opportunities.
Now, that said, I do suspect that the institution of playing/executing from optical media will die out in fairly short order(except for "watch once" stuff like movies. Optical media offer shitty latency, long load times, and are often pretty noisy. HDDs are faster and more capacious. SSDs are faster still, and capacity is climbing. I strongly suspect that most people would rather have a "15 minute 'install' consisting of dumping a disk image to internal storage, possibly in a compressed form that the console offers hardware accelerated decompression for, followed by fast level loads forever" to "Instant play, and 90 second level loads forever". Or, with a little cleverness, somebody could probably whip up a hybrid model: "Instant play, initially a touch slow as the disk image is dumped in the background, followed by gradually increasing speed as more and more reads take place from fixed storage, rather than optical disk".
Downloads, of course, will go to internal fixed storage(or external mass storage devices) no matter what.
Sorry to burst your bubble about the cartridge sticking out and seeing the "sweet artwork"... But if solid-state memory makes a comeback and we end up with multi-gigabyte solid-state devices for games, it's more likely going to be much smaller USB drive sized devices. If you're thinking a huge Atari 2600 or (woah) SNES or Atari 5200 cartridge, why would the company wanna waste all that plastic?
Or the consoles themselves could simply have a solid state internal hard drive for buffering. It could easily be the case in 10 years that the console could be equipped with a 1 TB solid state hard drive and all games are just copied onto this when you first load it.
Ignore all the pooh poohers here...cartridges are so much better than discs in so many ways (other than storage capacity, but with solid state, disks would be up against some very stiff competition...no pun intended).
For one, you can trust clumsy 6 year olds with them. They're way more resilient than discs. For another, solid state memory is getting so fast it's like playing your game right off your hard drive, instead of spinning a platter at a ridiculous speed (and all the heat and mechanical issues that go along with that).
Look, forget all the manufacturing "issues"...those complaints are just plain stupid. How did they make cartridge games in the old days, do you think? It's a manufacturing process and they actually flashed the software into the memory on the cartridge's board. The only 2 reasons I can think of that this wouldn't catch on is that the cost of manufacturing the memory vs. manufacturing a disk is too much that the ordinary person would opt to just download or buy the disk, or if people were dead set on backward compatibility with their current systems (which with gamers, isn't apparently the biggest deal...after all, you didn't see people sticking Atari 2400 cartridges into their Nintendo 64 systems nor do you see people trying to cram CDs into their old Super Nintendo systems...gamers will throw up their hands and upgrade their collection if the new systems are compelling enough).
Pressing a BluRay disc costs less than 3$ per disc (price for just 1000). Such a disc can hold 25 to 50 GB. A DVD is around 1$ and holds 5 to 9 GB.
A 16GB USB key is at 30$ and 8GB is 15$ on Amazon. I know this is rewritable but a ROM version won't cut its cost by 90%.
So we won't see SSD replacing discs on data heavy console games anytime soon.
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Plain and simple, even though Solid State storage is getting much cheaper, a 4GB Flash drive still goes for about 15 bucks on NewEgg for a decent brand. Where DVD's with 4.7GB are about 50 cents each. Blu-Ray discs are much cheaper in comparison as well. So as awesome as it would be to see cartridges come back, it's unlikely.
The manufacturing cost on a cartridge versus a disc makes the whole idea a non-starter. With a digital download service the cost if the disc disappears, but it is replaced by bandwidth and hosting costs.
I think that the best model for software distribution is what I've seen with Microsoft. If you have a license for the software you can download it directly from them. For a minimal fee you can get a media kit with the physical DVDs. I'm sure that MS isn't the only company with that model. They just happen to be the one that I'm familiar with.
The only way I see cartridges ever coming back is if the physical security of having a media type that the public cannot buy blanks for or manufacture themselves turns out to be more effective the DRM. Still, even if the public couldn't make cartridges themselves, they could read the information on a cartridge and then make a virtual cartridge on their computer. So, you'd need some sort of DRM also on the cartridge to prevent straight reading. It would have to be encrypted and never have the code all be in memory at the same time or a reproducible form. You could pretty much do that with non-cartridge games and since that would be the hardest part to overcome and making a virtual disk out of a cartridge would probably be trivial, I really don't see cartridges ever coming back.
Carts used to have coprocessors and other add in chips in them.
But they can be used to add mod chips / play unlicensed games with out needing to open the system up.
I've been thinking about this lately, but I was coming at it from another angle.
Don't think flash RAM or CD/DVD. Think about just how much you can cram onto a silicon chip if all you needed to do was to create arrays of crossed wires that, at each crossover, are either connected or shorted. Send a voltage down one line and read all the cross lines sequentially. Think of the capacity of flash ram, with the read speed of SRAM. And because the features are simply straight conductors, they could be packed onto a chip, layered and stacked, very densely (thus very cheaply). These would basically be custom, hard-wired permanent memory. _Fast_ memory. "What wait state?" fast. Might not even need to be on silicon, as it's just basically an array of crossed wires, so "two dollars per gigabyte" cheap is potentially feasible.
Now imagine a consortium of industry players led by Intel and Microsoft promoting a new, open hardware standard. On the motherboard you have, say 4 regular DRAM slots, plus 4 (or 8) new SROM slots. Each SROM would be mapped to an 8 or 16 GB address space in memory and would be read just like regular memory. The socket would be easy for consumers to use, perhaps like a long Compact Flash card with 200+ pins, or similar to the newer CPU sockets but long and thin.
Microsoft then contracts with a fab to make these SROM modules with Windows 7 on them. Under the new architecture, the Win7 code is read directly from the SROM, and doesn't need to be copied into RAM. Since the SROM is much, much faster than DRAM, load times are lightning fast. The OS is _already_ in memory from the instant the computer is powered on. Since every bit of the OS appears to already be in memory, permanently, none of it ever needs to be swapped to disk. Always having the same relative location on the SROM could have advantages too. Being non-writeable, it's also not vulnerable to virus or trojan manipulation, although a mechanism for on-the-fly patching from disk would need to be present. Easily secured since the patching program could be kept on the SROM, with a hard-wired decryption key, thus only patches encoded with the other half of that key would be executed.
From Microsoft's (and Adobe's, and any other maker of expensive software packages) point of view, it's a Copyright and DRM Silver Bullet. Piracy could be nearly eliminated. Boot sector viri could be nearly eliminated. Power-on to desktop times of 10 seconds might be the new norm. Pirated software would be stuck loading from disk and executing from DRAM. Game makers would surely be delighted, and oddly enough game buyers too, since they'd be getting an improved product without onerous DRM management. Free and FOSS apps would definitely have to adapt, but in the long run they would probably embrace such a new architecture as it'd let them more easily monetize and earn money. Download your (slow) disk-based apps and OS, or buy a (profitable) SROM with Firefox, Reader, and maybe a bunch of other free apps on it. Ubuntu could easily add a dollar or two of profit to each module.
Yes, there would have to be changes made in the way programs are compiled/stored to adapt them to the new architecture, and a host of other minor challenges. But, I really, truly believe that within a few years we'll be seeing something just like the above. And for once, we actually will embrace our new DRM overlords.
A blow from the side though (and usually a 2nd cartridge wedged into the unit to hold the loaded one against the contacts tighter) would get it going in a jiffy.
Seems the NES was the only system with this problem though (no doubt due to their goofy front-load spring-loaded design).
As the proud owner of a still-working but quite wonkey NES, and I can tell you that you are correct on both counts. In reverse order:
The connector does in fact suck, and makes poor contact because of the spring design. This is basically the entirety of the problem right there. The top-loader NES doesn't have this issue like every other console didn't, and if you used a Game Genie in your NES the problem would mostly go away as well (since it was designed to make contact with the connector when the cartridge holder was up).
Blowing definitely works, but the reason it works has nothing to do with dust or anything. It's because the humidity in your breath increases the conductivity so the crappy contact the cartridge makes will be enough.
Once I learned this, I stopped doing focused blowing from the side to try to get non-existent dust out, and instead use big open-mouth puffs. Works much better.
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Or will digital distribution reign supreme and transition our entertainment into the cloud? ....That's not "the cloud" you're referring to. In these parts, we call it the "internet."
The future of content distribution is really not a source of much debate. Electronic distribution is cheap, efficient, and easily controlled; the decision of how to physically store content once its distributed is up to console makers and (in some cases) end users. It is very likely that console and PC storage will eventually move to predominantly solid-state devices, but the means of distributing content to those devices are and will continue to be increasingly electronic. Seems like a no-brainer here.
[When my friends played GoldenEye 007 for N64,] you could pick Oddjob if you wanted, but whatever your kill count was at the end of the round, we got to punch you that many times.
That's why I never played as Oddjob but instead as the little girl Civilian #1.
its not the fault of optical media that load times are slow, its the fault of the optical media reader!
Simply put, you could *EASILY* engineer a drive to have a constant spin velocity and multiple lasers to read the media.
With this method you could lower the RPM of the optical drive considerably. The lasers are not that expensive. You could put 4 or 5 lasers in the drive and haveplaced around the hub so that any laser could read any part of the disk. some firmware to disable non-functional lasers. constant spin velocity could lower the noise level. multiple lasers would decrease read latency considerably.
This would require ZERO changes to current disk production methods and improve not only performance but also reliability of the drives. Something like RAID for read heads. If one fails, turn it off and use 4. each laser is mounted on its own track.
A memory card that's the size of a postage stamp is a far cry from something like an NES cartridge.
The actual ICs aren't much bigger than an original Game Boy cartridge. I'll admit the packaging got smaller, in part because Nintendo switched from word-addressed ROM to block devices.
But when a memory card can hold dozens, if not hundreds of games, the idea of having a piece of media that holds just one title is really the part that should be going out the door.
Hundreds of games on one memory card? I liked WarioWare too, but selling copies of individual games at retail isn't going away until broadband becomes cheap even out in the sticks.
Nintendo DS games come on cartridges.
Apparently you're confusing "went out of style" with "completely ceased to exist".
Nintendo handhelds have used cartridges for the past 20 years straight. So unless Nintendo handhelds have gone out of style, carts haven't. (The Battle Kid stuff was an aside.)
Second, even Nintendo is getting away from cartridges (see the Nintendo DSi).
Not for the beefier titles, like 256 megabyte games that are as big as the DSi's whole internal flash memory.
Marrying vast spaces of discs... is that like marrying into huge tracts of land?
How did they make cartridge games in the old days, do you think?
There's a reason why you can make a shield out of used Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt carts and some carts are priced in the collector world at several thousands of dollars.
They made either a lot of them, and if the game flopped, took a huge loss, or didn't make many of them and leave the game's availability scarce.
Discs make sense. Cheap to produce, and you can produce less of them if you think you're just filling a niche audience, and you can produce more units quickly and cheaply should your game turn out to be a runaway hit.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Games only have to be detailed enough, and thus big enough (given that textures and movies take up the most space) to display at the max resolution the general market demands. That has been 720p, and while it will eventually move to 1080p as a standard it isn't there yet. Discounting Nintendo who has a specialized niche in the game market not as dependent on bleeding edge graphics, if we assume the next generation of consoles are able to output in 1080p we will need space in the realm of 50-100GB which I believe is still within Blu-rays capabilities to provide. Given the speed at which ISP's are increasing their bandwidth to the curb, it won't be unreasonable to assume a download of 50-100GB is a non-issue. It takes approximately 2.5 hours at 40Mbps to download 50 Gigs, preloading and in game streaming of additional files can speed things up as well. So assuming my logic is still holding together, even with only 2TB of storage that is still 20-40 full games, most of which wouldn't need to be stored simultaneously through the magic of digital downloads, and in reality we can expect around 6TB to be a standard in about 2 years when any of this discussion matters. So given all of this, the first market segmentation will probably be between those people who have very fast 20+Mbps connections and those that don't. The speedbunnies will buy digital, the turtles will just buy blu-ray, and the market will continue to supply both until enough of the population has enough fast net connections at which point the turtles will only have the option to have a blu-ray mailed to them.
This has already happened. iPod touch is a solid-state game cartridge with game console built-in. The answer to "game cartridge or cloud" is "both". The iPod touch is rewritable and you load more games onto it over the Internet.
iPod nano is a solid-state CD/DVD with a CD/DVD player built-in.
Similarly, whereas you buy Windows 7 Ultimate on a DVD, you buy "Mac OS X Ultimate" on a Mac mini for $200 more. The packages are even about the same size. A Mac mini is not quite solid state yet, but will be soon. The principle is right though: instead of a "dead" DVD, you're getting a "live" disk with the rest of the components it needs built-in. Instead of "requirements: Intel Core 2 Duo" you get an actual Intel Core 2 Duo.
It's not just that solid-state storage got cheaper and higher-capacity, the rest of the device got much smaller and much more portable as well.
Its the only way the companies can truly control content. Don't pay your bill, your game ( application, data ) goes poof.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Those of use with chipped consoles find this whole debate moot. we've had a discless world for a while now.
What you describe exists. The console is called a "supergun", and the cartridges are called "JAMMA boards".
Carts used to have coprocessors and other add in chips in them.
I agree, it is the main advantage I see with the cartridges of old: the add-on chips extended the hardware functionality of the system, like the Super-FX, Cx4 and SA-1 chips in some Super Nintendo games, and all the memory mapper chips in the NES. They provided all kinds of neat affects.
Unfortunately, I think that unless the manufacturing costs become at least as low as optical media (ha, good luck), we'd be back to old days of seeing $80+ games (at least as they were up here in Canada) and considering a lot of people think $60 is expensive for a new game now, I don't think it would work out that well.
I remember the Micro Machines game for Genesis actually added 2 extra controller ports... Starfox Cart actually included an FPU/co-processor right in the cartridge...
In today's world of renting hardware from manufacturers *cough* bricked PS3 *cough* iphone... I just don't see console makers allowing that kind of control. Imagine if manufacturers could have just added their own graphics chip to the PS2 (most popular console still) would anyone have migrated to the PS3? (not that many did anyway)
I am sick of buying games and movies several times, due to shitty media. The my shiny golf plastic legend of Zelda cart still plays and still saves... more than I can say for my gamecube Zelda anthology disc.
not to mention if they did it right they could make it far harder to copy those games than disc based media... dedicated self destructive control chip between the memory and the console if a matching chip or software in the console is not present game doesn't boot combine that with a case of epoxy resin or molded plastic instead of typical abs bolted together or glued and it could be made incredibly hard to copy cart based games...
Given that cartridge based games seem to last about a bazillion times longer than optical disk and in most cases are much more durable, I would favor a return to cartridges. Especially considering I have Atari VCS games that still work perfectly ('70's) and PSX games that despite being carefully stored and handled do not due to data layer oxidation and other factors (early 2000's...) I think the results really speak for themselves.
Cartridges can be repaired and are much more resistant to abuse - a cart with a cracked case will still work (possibly with the addition of some duct tape) but a cracked optical disk is invariably toast. Cartridge shells can be replaced, contacts can be refurbished and cleaned, and also very importantly - game save data can be kept on the cartridge, with the game. No more "my memory card is full, but I don't want to lose any of my 100% completion RPG saves!" sort of scenarios. Also, cart mechanisms can be made with no moving parts, or at least parts that need to move during operation (loading and unloading are different stories) leading to lower power consumption and higher reliability. Hands up anyone with a Playstation of any generation with either a dead laser, spindle motor, or both?
you know the game console could just have an sd card slot, you then just sell ROM only SD cards- saves are stored on the system nowadays so you don't need to have the whole readable and writable format on the card- most 360 games aren't more than 4 gigs and many are far less, with a read/write standard SD card being $5-8 for a 2 gig you could certainly press them for even cheaper. Reading the games off of an SD would improve the power consumption for sure as well as speed loading.
It would also give the distributors the illusion that the new cartridges might be protectable... until crack groups proof them wrong again.
I see various estimates but something like 60% annual decline in NAND flash is not too badder ballpark figure. At current street prices of about $2.50 per GB in a usb flash drive, it's pretty much good economics right now for distributing games and software by flash-based cartridges.
Otherwise I'd say 2015 is looking good.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
You can put extra hardware into cartridges. GameBoy Golf had a battery to hold the state of gameplay. SNES StarFox had a whole graphics system on the cartridge.
So, a cartridge with a physics engine or a graphics accelerator would act as a hardware dongle. A cartridge which acts as a hardware dongle doesn't hinder legitimate gamers but it does hinder piracy.
Arguably, the hardware features of any retro game can be emulated but can these features be widely emulated before a game hits the bargain bin?
Not going to happen as long as SSD prices stay where they are. DVDs are just too much cheaper w/BR offering enough extra storage space for now.
Maybe sometime in the future software on flash memory devices may appear, but I'm going to stick with not anytime soon simply because of cost.
ALSO SSD are not quite as blazing fast as you may think, especially if we're talking flash memory types.
A DVD costs a few cents to produce. Several gigs of flash is still several orders of magnitude more expensive. If load times are THAT important of an issue, there are reasonable software-based solutions to solve that problem. No game company is going to sacrifice 90% of their profit margin just to make the game load 2 seconds faster.
-Restil
...but I'm just wondering how likely would it be possible for streaming play of a game online? You know how some video is available for streaming, I can gather its simpler since its a "one-way play" type of tech. I suppose it would be virtually impossible for interactivity with a streaming application? I'm probably sound really dumb, but anyway, just curious.