Game Disks or Game Cartridges on Home Consoles

[Zkuq]

RolStoppable said:

Zkuq said:

I don't have much experience with cartridges, but I love the concept. That's mainly because they're much more comforable to handle because they're not so fragile. I'm not sure which are cheaper to manufacture, but I'd still pick the cheaper one unless the difference is neglible. Of course speed is also a factor, but I think I'll leave that outside of this discussion (for now at least).

Discs will still be cheaper to produce for the foreseeable future, but cartridges have come a long way since the mid-'90s. SD cards are used in so many devices that the variants that systems like the 3DS and PSV use are cheap to massproduce. Of course, in 2011 when these systems launched, discs still far outpaced these cards in terms of storage capacity (cards could theoretically hold as much as 8GB while the PS4 uses dual-layered Blu-rays at 50GB a piece). Nowadays game development costs are a much bigger factor than the choice of storage medium when it comes to the retail price of video games; 3DS and Vita games cost $40 as opposed to $60 for home console games.

The Nintendo NX concept lends itself to cartridges/cards and by 2017 storage capacities of up to 64GB are feasible, although 8, 16 and 32GB cards would be a lot more common. For one, the smaller sizes are cheaper to produce, and two, most games would fit just fine on them. NX games would not be more expensive for the consumer than the games on other consoles, so that would fall into the category of negligible difference.

Hey, thanks for the information! I already though discs were cheaper, but I wasn't really up-to-date with my information, so I wasn't sure. Sounds like cartridges are a real option then.