| Jon-Erich said: Cartridges. They are completely different today than they were 20 years ago. They fixed all the problems with cartridges (storage space, cost) and still have all the advantages of older cartridges. I think discs are starting to become the obsolete format now, especially given how poorly they seem to work with modern consoles. |
How did they fix all the problems? A 64Gb card is still way more expensive than pressing a dual layer blu-ray. Publishers won't even fork out for a second disk if the full game doesn't fit and make you download the rest...
How do they still have all the advantages? Large games will still need to be installed whether the come on a card or not, simply to maintain one patched version on the hdd, identical with the digital download version. Developers could use the blu-ray drive today, it's a lot faster than the one in the ps3 and is perfectly suitable to load data from in parallel next to using the hdd. Last gen, games were optimized to use both and some even outperformed the digital version on the much slower older blu-ray drives.
Load times are not going away either with cartridges, unless the games become tiny again. Does installing a game to an SSD remove load times? Does the 3DS not have load times?
It would be lovely to have the game with all patches and savegames on it's own cartridge. I don't see it happening though. Imagine how long it takes to write an 8GB patch to a cheap flash card. Discs are the cheapest way to distribute games. Unless consoles become so small a disc won't fit, they'll stick to using discs. (Or just go full digital)
