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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!'"
...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?
Many people accidentally leave their doors unlocked, garage doors open, etc. In fact, you can easily open anyone's garage at any time. Or break their large bay windows.
But you don't see people being robbed all the time due to these facts.
Locked doors are little more than security theater for our own minds. If someone *really* wants to rob you, they will.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I believe this is partially due to the variability of PC hardware. You can't just program the game to load on the fly due to the fact that you can't target a certain known disc speed. The person's hard drive could be nearly full (hence a commensurate reduction in seek time due to fragmentation) or what not.
What I see happening eventually, is that every console will come with a high speed 32GB SSD as a loading cache. What will happen is that at the beginning of the game there will be a long load, and then in the background the game will continue to load the entirety of the pertinent data into the SSD while the game is playing. Video cut scenes and such will remain on the disc.
This would eliminate the vast majority of load times, because as you're wandering into a new zone, the console can dynamically load the pertinent information from the SSD to the memory as you're walking there. A 10 second load time from a bluray disc (which I believe is roughly 20MB/s from an optical disc, to a dynamically cached system where pertinent data is just copied on the fly. Modern SSD's can saturate modern consoles memory banks in about 2 seconds flat. Even the 'value' 32GB SSDs run about 190MB/s. By guaranteeing a minimum baseload speed (A freakishly fast one at that) load times could permanently be eliminated as the player could never travel through the game world fast enough to outstrip the loading speed of the SSD.
And since the drive would likely be emptied and trimmed every time the game was done, drive performance would remain consistent. The lack of a swapfile would mean that the IO load on the disc would be low, meaning it would probably outlive most components on the console.
Additionally, they could sell a separate 'quick load' accessory which would slide into an external slot, and be another 32GB SSD which when put in there would allow maybe 10-15 games have the initial data for start up be present on the disc, with the primary caching SSD still there. This would allow initial game data to be read off the quick load disc and while you would still need to have the game disc inserted in the drive, would all but eliminate all semblance of long loads from the beginning of the game to the end of the game.
To sum up, all modern games have long load times because they either have a fixed (but slow) loading media for loading on the fly, or a medium speed (but of inconsistent space/speed) media, where you have to assume the lowest common denominator. Having a quick SSD, solely dedicated to caching the content for one game at a time, would give you a blistering fast minimum baseline from which you could design your game from the ground up to take advantage of, and with modern games saturating RAM would only take about 2-3 seconds, meaning that it's unlikely that the gamer would ever interact with the game in a manner that would outstrip the SSD's ability to load this.
Additionally, this would allow game developers to create more rich, vibrant worlds as less of the level would have to be in memory at a time to ensure loading times remain reasonable, allowing higher LOD within the game world being rendered at the moment, and the guarantee that when the player moves the SSD will be able to keep up the pace. Additionally, it would free up more memory by allowing certain things (like textures of the landscape being rolled in) to be streamed from the SSD instead of cached in RAM, as well as pretty much all audio samples, giving more memory available for game objects being immediately interacted with.
A small, 32GB 200MB/s read SSD would likely give the developers a LARGE amount of leeway in ensuring that loads NEVER have to happen, save a small bit at the beginning of the game, while freeing up a lot of memory (brought in by the fast pace of streaming from the SSD, and quick access times, broadening the scope of what can be streamed) All while ensuring that games don't need to be packaged with 30GB of ROM, thus saving the costs of the ROM packaging, and probably paying for the SSD in 3-4 games versus the cost of ROM.