Will Game Cartridges Make a Comeback?

[wraggster]

With the cost of solid state memory going down, will we see the return of the game cartridge? Or will digital distribution reign supreme and transition our entertainment into the cloud? This editorial explores the beginnings of the cartridge vs. disc battle of the '90s and theorizes a second one in the future. 'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"? You pop the game into the top of the console, so the game is sticking out the top like in ye olden times, and you could see the sweet artwork on the front of the cartridge. The nostalgia is killing me!'

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/05/07/195231/Will-Game-Cartridges-Make-a-Comeback

[VampDude]

Nintendo are keeping them to a minimal with the DS, which I don't think will ever change for Nintendo and their handheld devices. Though for regular home consoles, there wont be any change in the disc formats, except that Microsoft and Nintendo might adopt Blu-ray in he future because games are getting bigger and to re-enter the cartridge era would be expensive for both the consumer and publisher when there could be cartridges of 15-30GB instead of 256-518 megabits (32-64MB) to the largest that the Nintendo 64 had on offer. Games for the cartridge based consoles proved expensive when there was the cheaper alternative of CD's (now DVD and Blu-ray), which I would stay with the disc format for all the things that wasn't available for cartridges.

[Eviltaco64]

These days, storage media is cheap and continuously expanding in size while decreasing in price.

In the days of the most advanced carts like N64 (512 MBit/64 MB max) and Neo-Geo (1 GBit/128 MB max?), that wasn't the case.

[inlovewithi]

I always expected cartridges to make a comeback. It truly is the superior technology. It might be still more expensive than a DVD, but not by that much as of now, and the prices keep getting lower and lower, while the capacity keeps getting higher and higher. Don't kid yourself an 8gb is a lot of memory, so I'm sure most next generation games won't use double that that often. I'm willing to sacrifice tons of cut scenes for a faster storage device. Another thing to remember is that flash cards is not the same as the old cartridge carts. With flash cards the game still has to load into ram, while the old cartridge card was basically the ram. At least that's how I always imagined it, though I could be wrong. I'm probably right, since old games had absolutely no loading time, and they would have it they were using flash.

[jamotto]

Hell will freeze over before carts make a come back for consoles.

[mmochel]

Cartridge games have advanced a great deal such as the fact that some of the newer DS games are 256 megabytes.
Also even the old cartridges had to load the data from the ROM chips into the system RAM for the CPU to manipulate it.

I also believe that optical discs are a dying format, we are slowly moving to solid state memory. I would love to see a console system utilize cartridges again, but I suspect that the majority of content will be delivered through downloads.

[Auriman1]

I'd fully support a push towards more cartridges. Less noise, less power usage, less chances of spontaneous failure, and faster loading times compared to optical discs.

[Mew]

I'd LOVE to see game cartridges back! like everyone said: they have faster load times, they're getting cheaper and cheaper.. and they are going to be bigger and bigger as well!

[psyfirefly]

They wont make a comeback. If anything all consoles will end up having larger internal storage, and probably expandable with solid state media, which you download games onto from just one available store, which is what is happening with the DSi and PSP.

The real reason that physical media is being phased out is most likely due to its resale value. For everyone who buys a pre-owned game, thats one less person buying it brand new. With digital media you cant resell it.

Bad news for the individual as well as the industry. Remember everything is motivated primarily by profits.