Do you think game cartridges will make a comeback in video game consoles?

[ChichiriMuyo]

twesterm said:

ChichiriMuyo said:

twesterm said:
God I hope you're not serious. Unless you want your games to go up in price a good $30-40 it's not going to happen.

 

You really have a penchant for overexagerating things to an extreme and making it seem like you honestly believe yourself, doncha?  The vast majority of games released today could fit onto a 4 gig sd card, which can be had for as little as $6 from newegg, and 8 gigs goes for $12.  The cost to the publishers would obviously be even less than that.  It may add $10-15 in cost at most, and that's if anyone did it today.  Those prices are half of what they were this time last year, and that was about half as much as the year before.  At least for the next 3 years or so prices are going to continue to plummet as well, and any growing needs for space (which are still very limited) will be met.  Still, the increase would be noticable and not positively recieved by many.

Ok, so a 4gig SD card is $6, how much do you think a single DVD is?

And you're crazy if you think they wouldn't get marked up.

 

Uhh, maybe you should, like, check the math or something.  Go ahead, add that up.  If it costs $6-12 retail and games go up by $10-15, that's an additional mark up of $3-4 per game at the retail level above and beyond the relative cost of production.  Yeah, that was real hard to see there, huh?  And as had been said before, those costs are coming down ery fast right now, essentially halving every year. Also, on top of that, the format opens up a lot of other options to improve revenues, such as reduced shipping costs (smaller packaging is an option) or permanently associating a game with a system, ending the used game market.  You can't do that very well with discs used for consoles. 

Again, you're exagerating to quite an extreme.  When the N64 was in production carts cost more than $20 to make for much of the system's life and many games were still released at $50, though it was more likely to see a game over $60 on the N64 than PS1 relative to library size.  If they could maintain nearly the same prices on average when the product cost an extra $20, do you really, honestly think cheaper memory would jack the prices up even higher?  That's not even logical in the slightest.

Another thing that bears noting:  carts load much faster, so greater compression is an option.  One of the things that kept the N64 competitive was that data could be compressed to a 6th the size while the PS1 had very little in the way of compression.  This allowed RE2, a 2 disc game, to end up on a single N64 cart with some sacrifices, and N64 carts at their most only held 1/10th of a CD's worth of data, rather than being pretty much the exact same size as the standard (like, say, flash to dvd).