The cart limitations of the Switch is really starting to hurt the console.

[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

It won't affect the PS4/XBO anymore, though. But it could affect their successors. Getting more than 100GB on an optical disc is proving to become impractical (UV lasers get stopped by the slightest dust particles, hence why a blue laser is the practical limit for end-users), but with increasingly bigger textures and game worlds, that won't be enough for long anymore.

Whilst your post is accurate... There is a successor to Blu-Ray known as the Archival Disk which starts at 300GB - 1 Terabyte of storage.
And Sony even managed to cram 3.3 Terabytes into a disk.

Whilst you are accurate that there are practical physical limits to the lasers... There are ways to cram more data in by reducing crosstalk and error detection... This is a similar issue that mechanical disks have had to deal with for awhile.

Archival discs, as their name implies, are meant for long term archiving of media (like movies) and not intended for consumer level products:

“The development is specifically for professional archiving,” the Panasonic spokesman said. “We are not currently considering optical discs for household consumer use.”

In other words, those are probably too expensive to make or too fragile to warrant consumer products with them. In any case, I don't expect any consumer products, like consoles, with those.

Improved error detection and reduced crosstalk would probably work, but that would also make both the discs and the drives more expensive. Hard drives had to sidestep this by now and are using helium-filled cases (because helium has almost no air friction and is easier to handle than pulling all the air out, creating a vacuum) to allow for faster rotation speeds, and no dust and more discs inside the casings.

So yeah, like I said, more than those 100GB don't seem practical right now. It's technically possible, but very unlikely to be used in consumer products anytime soon.