I don't know. They're the same as the DS, yet upto 8GB for the 3DS. You can use DS and DSi cards in the 2DS and 3DS.
Nintendo is not forthcoming with any read/write speeds or any other details afaik.

Speaking from the consumer side of things, I have found literally no downsides to cartridges as opposed to discs. Maybe there are some on the manufacturing side, but since the 90s things have improved a lot, so it probably isn't that much of a difference.

Nowadays, most of my PS2 and 360 library is scratched and unplayable, and my cartridges from gameboy onwards still work fine besides Pokemon Yellow, which refuses to boot at all for some reason (probably from the hours I've played and abused it). Not sure if cartridges are feasible for a home console yet (at least for 1080p/4k), but for handhelds they work great. Minimal load times, easy to store in a case, and can survive multiple trips through a washing machine. :D

While movies on discs are still a thing I don;t see any good reason to go to cartridges. And eventually download and streaming will become more important than physical media. So I wonder if cartridges would ever return to consoles.

Cartridges are adorable.

Honestly carts in todays world are total new beast.

They could solve the HDD space issues we have today with 100s of updates and DLC without the need to uninstall games.

All that stuff should save to cart.

Most games today are 20-50gbs plus addons. Why? that fills up a hdd quickly and can only be played on the one system..

Imaging if you could store all that on the game's cart and play it anywhere.

Less moving parts too.

But alas that will never happen as devs need to milk money.

Look at destiny as an example

Destiny

Then about expansions come out

So what do they do? release the game again with the expansions built in. Why not release just the expansions for those who had the original disc? Pretty sure a third version some out with more content.


Sports game would fit this model the best. just download new rosters, but then you can't charge full retail.

I dont care as long as i can play the games :D

Was hoping to see a neither option.

While discs and carts have their pros and cons, i would rather go with discs but not for the reason or way some may think.

If there is one thing carts have got right is that they are using flash storage. And discs have got cheap to manufacture on their side.

But if we are talking about gaming consoles here, then the future lies with nvme M.2 SSD drives. Not only do they have the capacity to store significantly more data than either carts or discs, but since they are based on PCiE lanes they are significantly faster than anything discs or carts could ever hope to be. So they are basically the only storage media that could actually impact how games are made and for the better. Simply put we are talking about data transfer speeds of over 2GB/s.... it will literally bring an end to loading screens and a need for excessively large System OS RAM reserves.

So where do discs come in? I feel discs should serve as nothing more than a distribution medium. Basically you will never play a game off a disc but rather just install it on the internal SSD. Or download the game. Those that want to have a physical copy can still buy the disc (and of course it would have to be in the console for the game to work even tho it's doing nothing but acting as a security marker).

Discs for me.

They fit bigger games on them.
Newer discs are extremely hard to scratch and to get to stop working.

Carts are better. I never really liked discs. I know much of Nintendo's problem can be traced back to the decision of making the N64 cartridge based, but personally I am glad they went that way. I would have hated it having such slow disc reading as other consoles of the time. Obviosly things got better, but they still have setbacks cartridges wouldn't have.

Now there is one way I liked discs, the PC way. If they would just let you use the thing as a medium to install a game fully on a console, that would be great. So basically, I also agree with Intrinsic above.

For real-time gaming cartridges are the best. For cinematic games with alot of QTE and pre-scripted gameplay cartridges are a waste.