In spite of whether the whole industry should use game cards or carts is one issue, but for Nintendo to do what's best for them and provide games that you can share across both handheld and console alike. They must go back to or use some kind of flash or Rom medium to deliver their games. Disc drive technology is good for holding data, but it is falling to far behind the times as games become more detailed and grow in size. It makes no sense to have good gpus, cpus and ram to only be held back by the storage medium.

I think because discs have become a medium to watch films etc on DVD and BluRay. Cost and everything else aside, you cannot by films etc on a cartridge medium.

The reason for discs goes beyond games I suppose.

Cheaper games =/= Cheaper media ... 

Simple as that ... 

3DS games <= 4GB ... 

Current HD twin/PC games > 50GB ... 

You sure either the customers or the publishers want to eat up a potential extra $5 expense ? It's feasible but is it ideal ?

Well, nintendo will nintendo; but the bolded part of your post is what i disagree with.

If ee are talking abiut capacity, nithing can touch discs when it comes to cost:capacity numbers. Nothing at all. A disc will probably alwsys be the cheapest way to package in a lot of data.

Now if you are talking about the "times"..... like i have said already in this thread the real push is going to be towards internal drives. A disc/cart isn't just for packaging the game data. It also directly dictates how the game is run or the entire console architecture is built. To play your games, you hsve to get that data from the storage media to system memory. And thats what it really is all about. 

We have HDDs in consoles now cause a HDD(~150-550MB/s) is faster than a disc drive(~35-60MB/s). So all the game data is installed onto the HDD and ran from there. Making the storage media nothing more than a container to get your game from the seller to your console. Right now, thats the ONLY purpose storage media has.

But now throw an M.2 drive into the mix, and everything changes.  Now you have transfer speeds of over 3000MB/s. That is leaps and bounds better than anything else out there. You also hsve capacities ranging from 128GB all the way up to 16TB. When that becomes the norm, at that point more than ever will a storage media become nothing more than a distribution shell. And if that is the case, discs again become relevant cause again, its has got the best price to capacity ratio oit there.  

There's no reason to. Discs are cheaper and games install onto the HDD.

Man I hope carts come back to nintendo. Day one purchase for me then.

1 50GB bluray = ~10c

5M 50GB bluray = $500k

1 50GB Sdcard = ~$5

5M sdcard = $25M

$25M........

Thats why not

Yeah, was just gonna say...some of the people in this topic seem to be assuming that they'd actually make the cartridges the size of N64/NES/SNES cartridges. 3DS/DS-sized cartridges would be fine, PLUS they could make the packaging smaller, allowing for more games on store shelves and presumably slightly cheaper production costs for the game cases and potentially a little lower shipping costs for lighter/smaller game cases. Just my guess, though.

I'd definitely prefer cartridges, but doubt it'll happen, especially since things will probably be all-digital soon enough.

To the person who said they didn't mind installing the game onto their harddrive from the discs in order to make load times a little better, I'd hate that. Why would I want to deal with constantly installing and uninstalling games on the harddrive because there isn't enough room for them all when each game could just have its own cartridge and load much faster anyway? 

You're the one who started the comparison here ... 

What makes you think that Nintendo won't balloon up the size of their games when they move on to more powerful systems ?