Should next gen kinda do away DISC DRIVES?

[Pemalite]

Mr Puggsly said:

Pemalite said:

Keep in mind that not all non-volatile memory is the same and thus they do not all have the same costs.

Plus, just because something is economical, doesn't make it cheaper. It simply means it is affordable.

Non-volatile memory in the 32-64GB range is still in that affordability ballpark and getting better all the time.

I would prefer optical media though in a fixed-device for multimedia purposes... But carts also have favourable characteristics such as durability, size, power consumption and of course, read speeds. (And significantly, Random-read speeds.)

The capacity argument is no longer the same as the Nintendo 64 days though, technology has progressed significantly.

But even post N64 we've seen sacrifices to fit games in a smaller cart. It was rampant on GBA but became less of an issue on the DS devices, but those are technically not cutting edge like console games.

FFX-2 on Vita was a download even if you bought a physical copy. Pretty sure Borderlands 2 kept DLC as downloads as well likely for storage reasons.

So again, discs are cheaper and hold a massive amount of storage. Emulation is the real solution to videogame preservation, not a cart.

The Gameboy Advance and DS was before the era of cheap, large USB flash drives and SSD's.
NAND manufacturing has taken big strides in the last few years with stacked NAND chips, which reduced costs and increased capacity.

Again. I am not disputing the fact that discs are cheaper. Not sure how many times I need to iterate upon that. :P But it doesn't stop NAND being an alternative solution that is cheap and large enough.

Plus the advantage of high-speed carts is that, less data needs to be installed to the console itself... And assets can be streamed in real time thanks to higher transfer rates and lower access times which can significantly save on RAM.