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  • In the early days, cartridges were kinda like swapping out the RAM/SSD each time, pre-loaded with a game. Wasteful and expensive, even back then, but it was the best way to do it for the time.

    There was a short while there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed, where you could keep the game files on optical media while still accessing it fast enough to have reasonable load times. BluRay and hdDVD increased the capacity, but not the read speed enough to match.

    We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do, but switch games don't have 3d models and textures at the fidelity levels of other modern platforms.

    With current technology, delivering digital media on a storage medium that has the performance to actually play from it, is kinda like gift cards. Like yeah, it'd be nice, but I'd rather just have the NVME storage drive/money so I can use it for whatever I want.

    Maybe there will be another ultra cheap read-only storage medium one day, but right now, it's not a thing.

    • Interestingly, the performance aspect is one of the reasons some phone manufactures quote for removing the SD card slot. The gap between the performance of onboard storage and SD cards keeps growing, so people that add an SD card to their Android phone and store all their apps on it have a bad experience because the software isn't really designed with such slow storage in mind any more.

      Maybe SD Express will help? There's still some issues with it and it's still expensive, but in theory it should be able to support 800+ MB/s read speeds. Not as fast as an NVMe drive of course, but faster than a SATA SSD.

      Maybe the little storage cards from the Xbox Series X need to become a thing that's more widely used. I'd guess they're just M.2 2230 NVMe drives inside. Would be an interesting distribution mechanism for games (like a modern cartridge format) but they're just too expensive for that at the moment.

      • Like, sure, if I could buy a storage drive that just comes with a console game I want already on it, that could be cool.

        But really, I'd rather have a plain drive than a drive that can only store that one game.

    • there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed

      90% of the games didn't need that much storage. As someone growing up in a country with no copyright laws at the time, I was used to 100-200 games on a single CD. Then my dad got an official copy of MK Trilogy and I remember thinking how wasteful it was to use an entire CD for one game (you could physically see on the surface of the CD how much data was recorded on it, and it was mostly unused space).

      Then there was the rare game that used not only the entire storage, but needed multiple CDs for the whole thing (e.g. Phantasmagoria).

      We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do

      Switch games get online updates too though. They're not much different from other platform games in that regard.

      The overall issue being discussed is not physical media vs downloading games. It's the fact that the games you get are not a final playable version, but still need additional downloads to make them playable (zero-day patches are a norm these days).

    • I want this so much. I dream about making cartridges that are glorified PCIE NVME caddys and the slot on your console being essentially a PCIEx4 slot.

      Maybe we could port some games and wrap them up as flatkpaks.

      I'm just spit balling but it could work.

      • Why would you want that? Do you like getting gift cards instead of the money?

        There's a reason storage media gets cheaper per byte as you go up in capacity, because 30 small drives with their own PCBs and controllers and ram-caches, instead of one big one, isn't better.

        At most, I could get behind taking your memory card with you to a games store, and have them copy game files onto it from a local archive drive.

        But who tf looks at all the BluRay boxes in the games section and thinks "these should all have an entire SSD in them." At least optical media only distributes the actual storage component, all read/write components are in the drive.

  • For consoles, yeah that was great. The problem was when you had to download a game on PC either from disc or maybe you used a service like shockwave to get your games. Then the installation felt like it took forever as a kid.

149 comments