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Forums - Gaming - Could "Cartridges" (Or Something Similar) Make a Comeback?

 

Could Carts Make a Comeback?

Already making room on my shelf 29 24.79%
 
It's certainly possible 36 30.77%
 
Highly Unlikely 31 26.50%
 
Vinyl has a better chance at a comeback 21 17.95%
 
Total:117
Frogger on 13 March 2016
Shadow1980 said:

While carts have narrowed the gap in terms of storage space (a 3DS cart can hold up to 8GB, so I imagine a bigger SNES/N64-sized one could potentially hold as much as a Blu-ray player) and are more durable and have no load times, the cost is still going to be a major factor. N64 carts cost something like $10-15, ten times greater than the cost of an optical disc. Also, if multiple systems were cartridge-based then each one will have its own proprietary cartridge design. Publishers might not want to expend that kind of money or deal with the hassle of multiple standards. Even if they did, those costs are going to be passed to us, so we could see the return of the $70 price point, which hasn't been seen since the N64. While $70 isn't as much today, given how much gamers today complain about the $60 price point that's been around forever, a $10 hike might not go over well with a lot of people (well, with a vocal minority on the internet, at least).

Would it be nice if carts came back if they could hold at least 50GB of data? Yes. Will it happen. Probably not. They just cost too damn much compared to a disc.

EDIT: And to those proclaiming the death of physical:

That pie chart means nothing to a digital platform. Music was all physical until the day it wasn't. Digital only on consoles isn't going to be some gradual shift. It's going to be a hard stop. A company of going to stop providing physical media, consimers are going to buy the digital only platform, they're going to love it, and then the competition are going to phase out the physical varients of their consoles while introducing digital only at the earliest opportunity until they are only doing digital.



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Illusion on 13 March 2016

Well, technically cartridges never went away since the 3DS still uses them.

I think if the NX turns out to be the combined handheld and home console concept then the continued use of the (SD card-based) cartridges is not only possible but likely.

Firstly, I don't see Nintendo going 100% digital given the huge benefit physical releases give their Amiibo line. If Nintendo goes digital with their releases then they will be essentially telling gamers to stay at home to buy their games which fundamentally undercut their Amiibo concept. No, I believe that the NX will still have physical releases of some kind.

Now if the NX is a unified handheld and home console then I do not believe it will use discs as the physical media either: that just wouldn't work well for the portable unit. I think the handheld variant of the games will come on SD cards that will be usable by the handheld. If you want to play the games on your home console then you will pay an extra 10-20 dollars for the 1080P HD texture packs and next-gen shaders and this will be downloaded to the NX home console as an add-on for the SD card content. Doing this will also help to minimize file sizes on the SD Card since I believe SD Cards start to get expensive when you go above 32 GB.



Frogger on 14 March 2016
RolStoppable said:

I don't think that Capcom was worried about cards. Besides, Capcom isn't a company that makes the best decisions or even good ones. They've made a lot of bad decisions in the past few years, hence why their financials haven't been good.

As for the Atlus games, they aren't 4GB. You want to believe that they are, because you want that to be the reason for their price, but SMT IV takes up only 14.339 blocks (1GB is roughly 8.000 blocks, so the game fits on a 2GB card). Certain publishers charge more for their games because they know that they can get away with it. That's all there is to it. It has nothing to do with the cards, unless you have some evidence to back it up.

It doesn't matter what kind of hardware Nintendo provides. Third parties won't be happy regardless because their games won't sell as well as Nintendo's. That's something that third parties will always blame Nintendo for and no kind of hardware parity can fix that. That's why cards as storage medium won't be anything to worry about. Third parties won't like to do business with Nintendo either way, but cards are good for Nintendo because NX benefits from it.

Lastly, Nintendo doesn't have the kind of sway over consumers to make them switch from physical copies to digital ones. The last time Nintendo made a drastic change (goodbye Wiimote, hello Gamepad), more than 50% of the consumers didn't get over it.

You were right before. We could go at this for days and never get anywhere.



Frogger on 14 March 2016
Illusion said:
Well, technically cartridges never went away since the 3DS still uses them.

I think if the NX turns out to be the combined handheld and home console concept then the continued use of the (SD card-based) cartridges is not only possible but likely.

Firstly, I don't see Nintendo going 100% digital given the huge benefit physical releases give their Amiibo line. If Nintendo goes digital with their releases then they will be essentially telling gamers to stay at home to buy their games which fundamentally undercut their Amiibo concept. No, I believe that the NX will still have physical releases of some kind.

Now if the NX is a unified handheld and home console then I do not believe it will use discs as the physical media either: that just wouldn't work well for the portable unit. I think the handheld variant of the games will come on SD cards that will be usable by the handheld. If you want to play the games on your home console then you will pay an extra 10-20 dollars for the 1080P HD texture packs and next-gen shaders and this will be downloaded to the NX home console as an add-on for the SD card content. Doing this will also help to minimize file sizes on the SD Card since I believe SD Cards start to get expensive when you go above 32 GB.

People don't buy amiibo for games. Nintendo said this. Amiibo won't be affected at all when the NX goes digital.



Frogger on 14 March 2016
Shadow1980 said:

If the console market becomes the first entertainment sector to go all-digital, it'd be the first. And they would have to force it because most console gamers clearly aren't demanding it. And we saw what happened last time a console maker tried forcing radical shifts in the status quo in regards to the relationship between consumer and product. Most music consumers chose to go mostly or completely digital, but most book readers did not. But they had and still have a choice. If the game industry decides that we just don't get to make that choice, I think we'll see a repeat of the Crash of '83, and it'll be entirely deserved. Not only would tens of millions of potential customers be shut out entirely, but also many millions more would give the industry a big middle finger. I know I for one would cease supporting the industry if they tried forcing digital on me.

The console market isn't like any other market in one crutial way - there are only three platforms. The reason books can still do physical is because books aren't tied to a platform. Music isn't tied to a platform. Games are. It only takes three to kill digital on consoles, and it would benefit those three to do so. People wouldn't suddenly stop playing games if consoles went all digital, just like they wouldn't stop reading books under the same circumstances. For most consumers, their love for their hobby is not based around the format the games come in. It will be a non issue. When push comes to shove, they'll just get digital, because no one but a select and insignificant few are so passionate that they'd boycott a platform with games they want because they have to download them.



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Illusion on 14 March 2016
spemanig said:
                                         

People don't buy amiibo for games. Nintendo said this. Amiibo won't be affected at all when the NX goes digital.

The people who buy Amiibo's are also typically the same people who buy Nintendo games, though.  It's a huge marketing pull to have a shelf of Amiibo right next to 4 shelves of Wii U and 3DS games.  For example, I am not going to drive out to Best Buy just to buy an Amiibo but I might pick up that Woolly World Amiibo that I kind of been wanting the next time I am at Best Buy to buy a game that I have pre-ordered.  One product helps to the sell the other regardless of the in-game functionality.  An all-digital platform is basically a statement to gamers that they should stay at home and not even bother going to the Nintendo-section in electronics stores:  I don't believe that is the message that Nintendo wants to be sending right now with Amiibo being a integral part of their business.



SvennoJ on 14 March 2016

I highly doubt it.

Even if it's going to happen they will be cheap and slow read only cards, which have to install to the hdd before you can play. Making convenient 300 MB/s uhs sdhc cards on which you can also write save games, way too expensive.

I wonder if Sony is going to use 4K discs next gen. Games keep getting bigger, and one 100 GB disc is probably cheaper in the long run than 2 standard blu-rays. Adding an extra layer is all a 4K disc is anyway. Most games won't need 3 layers, a lot only need 1 actually.



fatslob-:O on 14 March 2016

Not this generation ...

SD card prices have only gotten 50% cheaper in the past 3 years and ROMs are made from the similar NAND technology. A 64GB ROM will hardly be competitive in terms of price ...



Intrinsic on 14 March 2016

technically they are already here.... albeit called something different.

nand flash storage and SSDs or even M.2 drives.

As something that will be sold along side every game copied on it, no. It can't make a comeback. considering how cheap discs are to make.

I do see m.2 SSDs coming with the next generation of consoles tho. Not only will 1TB nand storage be ridiculously cheap by then but the performance boost they could give consoles is too much to ignore. Going from the current ~150MB/s now to around 2GB/s is no joke.



FallingTitan on 14 March 2016

with FLASH memory being so cheap and most games under 64 gb i can see big game company's getting the carts for super cheap and this being possible.