| TheBraveGallade said: I never stated that a disc cannot fit the entirety of a game. with 4k blu ray everything this gen and probably the next one will have enough room to fit in at least 2 discs. the issue is that discs will never go back to plug and play, plus reading then writing to the INTERNAL SSD is going to take a while, not to mention the hassle when you have to make room for it. at that point might as well go for a 128GB, 80$, plug and play cart for phisical. |
You won't get 128 GB carts with enough speed to be directly playable from for $5 production cost extra. And if you can't directly play from it, there is no point to replace much cheaper to produce discs. Switch games load faster from internal storage than from carts, for example
Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild - Great Plateau loading times
Switch Cartridge - 35:45 seconds
Internal 32GB - 30:42
You also get no benefit from using over UHS-1 cards so 100-150 MB/s is about the max you get vs 5 GB/s in the new consoles. The internal memory in the Switch peaks at 300 MB/s. 128 GB carts that can do 2.5 GB/s don't exist yet. Fastest carts atm do 300 MB/s and cost in the $100 range.
128 GB NVME 'carts' are more affordable, bigger as well but can be bought for $30 (internal version, needs housing etc). Still an order of magnitude more expansive than stamping a disc even at scale. Material costs will always be higher compared to discs.
You could make it so discs are a secondary source of data. Leave all the audio on the disc and load it from there while installing all the textures etc to internal storage. Uncompressed audio takes up a lot of space and loads fast enough from the 27 MB/s blu-ray drive while playing. It would save internal storage space and actually still be a bit faster since now you have 2 separate places to load data from. However this is extra effort and creates a difference between digital and physical versions.
