I've always theorized that we might eventually go back to cartridges, but I think even when it comes down to it, losing a dollar vs losing 50 cents is a big difference over 5m sales.

EDIT: On top of which, I think the goal is to go as digital as possible and leave behind production costs associated with hardware.
I think a cool in between would be plug and play solid state drives that you could bring to gamestop, fill up with games and take around with you. That would eliminate the need for downloading, and eliminate production costs.

Like, imagine if you could take an amiibo or something, bring it to gamestop, copy a game onto it and bring it home. I think that would be pretty cool.

Okay. Two things.

1. Superior in every way is an exaggeration. Though I do find it is normally worthwhile to buy digital games.

2. "more superior'? Come on man.

Why use 80s technology? For nostalgia?

While lord knows they'd prefer everything to go digital, there has been resistance from both consumers and distributors to that idea for obvious reasons.

Sony, for even more obvious reasons, will be sticking with their own format (Bluray) until they drop physical media for good.

Microsoft pays Sony for their format, as it was just the cheapest and best one available at the time.

If the Nx is indeed some sort of hybrid it really seems like something akin to memory cards (not the same as cartridges) would, for the first time, finally be a somewhat viable option going forward for them that would actually kind of make sense. They've grown ever cheaper with consistently increasing storage space, and Nintendo has always been loathe to pay anyone else for use of their format (remember their refusal to remove on from carts and then their own tiny optical disks for the GC?).

I do hope the Nx uses them, as that would be pretty neat. There is zero chance Sony will, however, and it's damn unlikely Microsoft ever would either.

He was clearly saying who uses CDs for holding information

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc

"been commercially available since October 1982."

Wow people need to bloody read about tech and not just play games

Cart of 80s and 90s is not the same of 2016 lol.

Let's look at today's gaming problems:
- Huge installs
- Patch installs
- Addon installs
- All digitally tied to that console
- Eventually you run out of hdd space, so need to upgrade drives or uninstall games
- When generation ends and servers are off, no more ability to download patches for buggy games. AKA retro gaming is dead on these systems.
- Console dies you are screwed as you lost all your patches and broken games become unplayable.


Now with some modern carts, lets look at the positives:
- Could make a hybrid with read only and write memory. This would allow the core game to be stored on read only section. Game saves and patches updates could be written to the write section.
- Could be taken to a mates house and played on their system.
- No need to upgrade hdds because of space issues.
- When a consoles dies you simply put it in a new one and it works.
- Retro friendly as all the patches will be there until the cart dies. So means you can replay those games.

As many have said, it all comes down to price. But dont worry, disks will probably remain as the primary distribution package, but those carts you want will permanently reside in your console in the form of M.2 drives.

be it digitally downloaded, or a disc, or even a cart..... there is no need to invest heavily into the packaging model when the game will just be installed onto an internal drive anyways.

By 2020, i expect that any console we see then will come with an M.2 drive instead of a SATA drive. And we can have transfer speeds of over 3GB/s. Significantly more than anything we can do with SATA, discs or even carts. SIGNIFICANTLY MORE.

That's a very expensive idea. Read / write cards that are fast too are a lot more expensive than pressing a disc. The read speed of that example card up there is not even as fast as a standard hdd, write speed is usually much slower, games with autosaves would be a problem. Plus what upper limit do you set for patches and dlc.

I've never lost the ability to read a dvd or blu-ray, yet several of my memory cards have gone corrupt, one completely unreadable after 6 years. There's tons of recovery software for memory cards, it's not the most reliable long term tech. Read only cards are probably a lot more durable yet that negates all the benefits.

It's an attractive solution, all patches, dlc and save games together, yet with game prices at $80 already here, not worth it.
Better is a console that can take full benefit of an SSD drive and keep the delivery system cheap, disc or download.

- You can transfer the "License" between machines in seconds.
- All my data for my Xbox 360 and Xbox One is on external drives so I can shift them between consoles.

Retro gaming will be hampered though once they shut the servers off, which will be sad to see. Tons of games on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have already gone that way where DLC etc' is no longer downloadable due to expired licensing.

Disc media is probably on its way out, in general people stopped using discs for music ages ago and using them for movies and PC software has also started to fizzle out.

Games will be next.

Your kids will laugh at you when you tell them you used to play video games on plate sized shiny discs.