This is a question I've been mulling over for some years now, initially spurred by my visits to CVS. It seems nearly every time I visit the pharmacy that, as one would expect, those tiny memory cards for various different cameras have both grown in storage space and dropped farther in price, to the point where many would be more than capable of containing the entirety of AAA games like Dying Light or Alien: Isolation, patches included.
Now, first I'll address the 800 pound gorilla in the room: the wishes of the console developers (Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo). Obviously, in their ideal world all games would be digital, providing them with 100% control of both availability and pricing. This has proven difficult for them, though, as the consumers have been very much against such a notion when it is proposed, the majority of the world is still without sufficiently reliable internet connections to make this work, and perhaps more importantly, the idea is exceedingly unpopular with the retailers that they have to appease to get their consoles on the shelves.
I must admit that I long assumed a digital only industry was in our immediate future, but given the resistance from consumers/retailers and the new technologies in memory (such as solid state drives) whose memory seems to be outpacing the size of modern AAA games while becoming increasingly affordable, I'm not sure it's entirely impossible that we'll see games distributed on a medium akin to what is currently used with the 3DS one day.
So what are your thoughts?
