| nanarchy said: First huge glaring problem is with your timeline, SSD's are not going down in price and in fact are expected to rise by as much as 20% this year and is the reason you still see most laptops etc coming standard with 128gb or 256GB SSD. 1TB SSD's are sadly unlikely to be affordable in the near future for consoles. Personally I would love to see the eradication of spinning media, USB or SD Card support for physical purchases combined with digital content on a large SSD. Just unlikely to happen till well after your suggested dates (at least not at a reasonable price) |
SSD's have come down in prices massively. And capacities have exploded in recent years, thanks to stacked TLC NAND and cheaper controllers.
But an SSD is not representative of the cost structures of a game cart.
| Mr Puggsly said: Ofcourse greater storage space in NAND will become cheaper over time, but developers will often opt for smaller carts to save money. It always happens. Even with HDD's you get into the greater storage for less money argument. Anywho, we've really dragged this conversation on too long. Carts are expensive, especially for a signfiicant amount of space. They seem to work okay for consoles not pushing cutting edge visuals though like portable devices. |
With some games, you could probably get away with a smaller cart anyway. During the early parts of this generation... A significant portion of the disc space was used purely for high-quality, 7.1 lossless audio. - Which for the majority of people is entirely unnecessary, even more unnecessary with the Switch considering it's speaker capabilities in handheld mode.
During the Playstation 3 generation, developers would sometimes duplicate data across the disc multiple times so as to reduce aggressive seeking during streaming of textures and meshes, carts don't have that issue.
Carts are certainly more expensive, that's been well established for decades. But they can still be a consideration at various price points thanks to scales of economies bringing prices down and capacities up the last few years.
Besides... Publishers are posting ever-increasing-profits. They can afford it.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
