LMFAO.

OT:

Too expensive.

Cartridges are pretty sweet. And they're more kid friendly, which is very important for the industry. If we get to a point where it costs less than a dollar for 10 gigs of flash memory, the game companies can just raise the price of the game by a dollar. And let's not forget that cartridges don't require cases, I recall SNES games coming in cardboard boxes, so there's the environmental factor as well as a slight reduction in cost. I really miss being able to switch between games in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.

I have brought up the whole "carts > discs" things a few times, and would love to see them come back - say for the Wii II.

If carts get advanced enough, there are two major points I'm not sure have been covered here:

1/ A fast cart effectively "acts" a RAM (albiet R/O ram). This means you can get away with a console requiring MUCH less RAM in hardware - which means a big drop in dev costs.

2/ Not having a disc drive within a console is a major plus. Big improvement on form factor (smaller), power use (less spikes from motors), reliability (moving parts) and cost.

I still see the carts v discs argument as one of the main reasons the DS beat out the PSP.

I remember the pain of cartridges... I mean the amount of times you and to try put it in different angles, blow on the cartridge and the smash the damn thing into the console was ridiculous. Even with today's disc your still doing the same at times. I prefer optical and BD has been awesome.

Its all about moore's law, every 18 months (i think more) prices go down. Its all over the web you can check it out. Look at the PS3, It used to cost like 800 dollars; as the years went by the blu ray diodes, gotten cheaper, and now that sony shrunk the cpu and gpu, they saved tons of money. Now they only reporting smaller losses, much smaller.

They require cases when they are the size of SD cards or smaller. Don't expect them to be the sizes of prior console carts. Those days are well over. I can't image how many games would be lost if we didn't have a standard way to store them. They would _still_ probably come in DVD sized cases.

When I was a kid I used to dislike cartridges because my perception was that they were old fashioned and represented obsolete technology.

These days... And seeing the example of the DS, I much prefer them and also would like to have games sold in flash drives.

Hopefully SSD's will be available for consumers at decent prices soon.

Factory produced optical media is basically "stamped" or pressed (injection molded) unlike writable optical media that have to be burned individually.

So a disk factory can crank out tons of disks pretty much faster than any other means of hard data replication once the glass masters are set up and the assembly line is ready to go.

Essentially, flash memory will never become cheaper to produce than optical media, which to software distribution companies is ultimately the bottom line. So unless flash storage provided a magical way of stopping game data copying/piracy, publishers have little reason to use it for full sized games, even as the price of solid state storage continues to drop because it still won't drop faster or lower than optical media.

Availability of larger flash storage capacities is irrelevant. What matters is cost effectiveness.

Yeah disk reading errors are a problem but I can't forget the times I had to blow all the dust of the cartridges and still couldn't play the game.

i haven't need to blow my DS. I did blow the NES and SNES though.