This is a question I've been mulling over for some years now, initially spurred by my visits to CVS. It seems nearly every time I visit the pharmacy that, as one would expect, those tiny memory cards for various different cameras have both grown in storage space and dropped farther in price, to the point where many would be more than capable of containing the entirety of AAA games like Dying Light or Alien: Isolation, patches included.

Now, first I'll address the 800 pound gorilla in the room: the wishes of the console developers (Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo). Obviously, in their ideal world all games would be digital, providing them with 100% control of both availability and pricing. This has proven difficult for them, though, as the consumers have been very much against such a notion when it is proposed, the majority of the world is still without sufficiently reliable internet connections to make this work, and perhaps more importantly, the idea is exceedingly unpopular with the retailers that they have to appease to get their consoles on the shelves.

I must admit that I long assumed a digital only industry was in our immediate future, but given the resistance from consumers/retailers and the new technologies in memory (such as solid state drives) whose memory seems to be outpacing the size of modern AAA games while becoming increasingly affordable, I'm not sure it's entirely impossible that we'll see games distributed on a medium akin to what is currently used with the 3DS one day.

So what are your thoughts?

Physical format will be gone in about 10 years and you want to bring back cartridges?

Blu-rays cost 50 cents each... for consumers... Bulk purchasers will pay even less, especially Sony who doesn't have to pay any licensing fees.

Margins on games are not all that high, so it will be quite a while before they'll drop Blu rays for SD cards.

NFC card could become a thing.
We're certainly moving into a Digital only gaming environment.
And I can imagine a future where instead of disc, you have a NFC card that holds the authorization to download and play the game.

If the cartridges allow for playing the game without installation.... you could ship a console without a harddrive... you could save some $ that way.

Also if you need a physical copy of a game to be playable on both a handheld and a home console.... bluray discs just dont work. Cartridges make sense then.

There are benefits to it.

Not even an iota of a chance. Too expensive. Nobody will go for it.

There is very little resistance from consumers for all digital. Digital Purchases have been increasing every year for years, to the point where games are now selling are digitally than physically. And don't "but PC" me. PC is one platform. There are three (eh, two for multi-plats) console platforms by comparison. Console games famously sell significantly better than PC games. Retailers don't matter as much as neither you or they think. PC is essentially digital only and you don't see Dell struggling to sell desktops. That's all in your head. Digital growing, not shrinking.

When someone finally makes a digital only console that is smart enough to not do things like not talk about games at its reveal, not brick your console when you're not connected to the internet, not try to still do physical media only without any of the few benefits physical media actually has, and not launch at $500 because it's being bundled in with a mandatory $100 scapegoat that is not essential at all to the gaming experience, it will be met with a nearly unanimous thunderous applause. And then a rag-tag team of protesters will cry foul passionately in a corner, unheard by the masses.

And since a certain platform will have a unified library, meaning they must use a unified form of media, meaning the handheld variant can't use disks, do you know what that means??? DIGITAL ONLY NX, BABY!!! I am astounded by my ability to turn literally any thread into an NX thread.

I'm like 80% that's what Nintendo plans to do with the NX in order to keep a retail presence. Only it will only be used to unlock the games. Which is what the XBO was supposed to do with its discs. 

...Which fai- ANYWAY.

That other 20% of me thinks they'll just say "fuck retail," they'll sell our consoles anyway, and just go all digital without it. But when Reggie said "physical thing," but wouldn't specify physical media, while preceding to reject the notion that it adds any security to your purchase or your game to buy it physically, I immediately thought of amiibo.

And then I cringed.

And then I remembered this:

And then I thought "Meh, not so bad."

I think "Cartridges" today would be something like an SD or SDHC card. It's widely used now, especially in gaming and it's faster than any BD. It's not impossible and PSV and 3DS are still using exact and derivative forms of the SD card. I think cards, ironically enough, are the future. They're small, lightweight, and can hold just as much as a BD easy. Most games these days don't go past 64GB and if so, it's due to updates that would be stored on an internal HDD. Loading times would be virtually non-existent without devs having to put together a magic system on discs. You don't have to worry about scratches or anything like that. The only cons are they can get lost easy and are difficult to handle over a disc.

I think they should make a comeback as they're getting really cheap to produce. Nintendo had something going with Nintendo 64, carts were just to expensive to make for too little storage. I think they can and should return. And again, it's not hard to rip formats from discs for piracy but it's more difficult to rip from a proprietary SD format. Thus cementing Nintendo's "fight" against piracy even though it's not done much for the 3DS sadly.

No, they don't make sense. Cartrages capacle of fitting both the handheld and console varients of a game, one that is supposed to accomedate all possible games for the platform, would have to be like 50GB+ in size. That means either devs would have to sell their games a significantly lower profit margin to keep that $60 parity with other consoles, or the more likely outcome, games that are $60 on other consoles would have to be priced at like $75 on NX, which consumers wouldn't pay for, which means devs wouldn't be able to sell their games, which means devs would stop supporting the NX, which means it would flop again. Consumers would either not buy the NX because the the game's prices would be so criminally inflated for no good reason, or 99% of them would buy all their games...

...digitally because its cheaper...

Maybe they will use carts.

Lol jk the backlash at $75 games would kill the console's PR before anyone ever got to the point where they could make that decision almost had me though A for effort or whatever

And that a 64GB cart would cost like 15x more than a disk of equivalent size, if not more. There's that insignificant little con.