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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!'"
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.
No, no, no, the ever-popular UMDs!
I'd bet for net delivery (DRM or not)
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.
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?
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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Eh. It only delays the inevitable. "A system that an attacker has physical access to is already compromised" doesn't just apply to computers.
'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 prefer my games on a reel-to-reel you insensitive clod!
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
I never had a problem with optical discs for reliability. I really really don't understand people who can't keep CDs in good condition.
CD-Rs I can kind of understand, since the reflective surface is applied to the top and often uncoated.
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.
No, but it sure would be nice to replace DVDs with flash drives. The disks I get from netflix are often unreadable. Recently, I went through seven replacements for a particular disk and eventually just gave up.
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.
Doesn't necessarily have to be. Discs are dirt cheap, but solid state is getting cheaper too. The original reason CD's took over was because they held a lot more than solid state and they were a LOT cheaper. Cartridges were faster and more durable, but that wasn't enough.
Today, solid state still has faster and more durable, and they've actually exceeded plastic disks in capacity. About all that's left is raw cost, but the difference is shrinking. If it gets small enough, it's not unrealistic to expect that the optical disc could fall out of favor.
That said, the disadvantage that BOTH of them have (namely being a physical item requiring shipment) will IMHO cause both to fail compared to downloaded content.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
We encouter this problem a lot. The majority of the Netflix we get (6 at a time, represent!) are either historical documentaries narrated by people with British accents, silent movies, or anime. I'd say roughly one out of every six discs we receive need to be given a ride in the Skip Dr. I can understand the anime and documentaries being scratched, since they are likely also gotten by people with kids...but the silent movies?!?!?! Who the fuck enjoys silent movies, but treats the medium they are contained on like crap? ::fist shake::
Living With a Nerd
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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People who try to put them into their film projectors? ;)
You think that is a problem? The damn wax cylinders for my phonograph keep melting in the heat!
"But this one goes to 11!"
My parents taught me proper LP record/45 single handling skills when I was young, before that, no touching. You need to do the same in regards to optical media.
I've been a Netflix subscriber since 2005 and I can count on my fingers (no thumbs!) the number of times I've had to return a movie. And the bulk of those were early on when I had a crappy DVD player. On a whim, I bought a new ($20 cheapo) DVD player instead of mailing the "bad" movie back and my failures dramatically reduced. Like from 5 in a year to 2 in the past 5 years.
Granted, I'm on the "1 at a time" plan but I almost always mail back right away so end up with 8-12 a month. That's 100 a year at least, so under 1% failure rate.
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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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> That said, the disadvantage that BOTH of them have (namely being a physical item requiring shipment) will IMHO cause both to fail compared to downloaded content.
Given that download games mean:
1. Tying up my Internet connection, possible for a large number of hours.
2. Having to manage my own backups.
3. Not getting the game any quicker (launch titles will frequently arrive by post before I could have downloaded the game, although pre-downloaded games that just need to be unlocked might beat this).
4. Paying extra (at least in the UK, it's common for download games to be £5 more than the price from somewhere like Amazon - seriously).
I'm not in a rush to move to them. I do buy download games where there's an advantage (typically this means something rare, or very VERY cheap), but almost universally we're talking 1-3 year old 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?
My paranoia has increased tenfold. Thank you, asshole.