Should next gen kinda do away DISC DRIVES?

[Mr Puggsly]

Pemalite said:

Mr Puggsly said:

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.

I hear ya, but aside from disc being cheaper they hold a massive amount of space. Flash memory holding comprable storage space gets expensive. In a few years I expect games to be on 100GB discs.

Games could be streamed off Bluray discs as well, I believe installations became standard because its easier for development and HDDs are ultimately faster. Also, games are often so heavily patched these a HDD has become necessary. Some physical copies of games are basically just using the disc as a key now.