joora on 29 October 2008
| afree_account said: An external drive would be stupid, cause the complete wii would be 99 dollars or less by then. Why sell an external drive for xx dollars then ? does the wii have an expansion port ? |
the external drive could easily be sold for 40$ then.
The advantage of the cartidge based system would be:
- faster possible accessing and copying the data
- smaller possible form factor of the game boxes (less shipping and transport costs)
- smaller possible form factor of the console (increased portability if needed, and japanese dig small-format electronics)
- if the game is small you could put it on 2GB cartidge which would probably be cheaper to manufacture, and therefore you could sell your game at the lower price (EDIT: if the game is large and of the high production values, you could put it on a 128 GB card if they become viable by then)
- lower energy consumption opposed to movable media ("greener" console)
- you could transfer data to cartidge (if you want to base your game around user input)
- optical discs are more prone to physical damage
The main disadvantage would obviously be costs of developement of a pirating-secure cart and reader. The other disadvantage could also be that nintendo would hold a monopoly on the cartidge manufacture.
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