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Are cartridges ever going to come back?
Henroid
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Just a minor thought I had this morning, but I'm wondering if we'll ever see cartridges come back to video game console use. The way I see it, we have every reason in the world to return to them. The two examples we have are USB storage (thumbdrives) and, even more relevant, the game cards for the DS.
While I can see the argument for the sort of comfort there is in media being on disc format (movies, music, games), and thus all of them sharing the same input slot on a console, the fact is we've already made the transition with music. While you can still buy it on traditional CDs, we're already using pocket size (and smaller!) devices for storing and listening to music.
Carts also don't have the load time drawback from discs while being capable of holding more data (or, potentially at least).
I appreciate the Saturn / Playstation era for carrying us over with disc formats, but it almost seems like they set this precedent that it has to be the format from now on.
While I can see the argument for the sort of comfort there is in media being on disc format (movies, music, games), and thus all of them sharing the same input slot on a console, the fact is we've already made the transition with music. While you can still buy it on traditional CDs, we're already using pocket size (and smaller!) devices for storing and listening to music.
Carts also don't have the load time drawback from discs while being capable of holding more data (or, potentially at least).
I appreciate the Saturn / Playstation era for carrying us over with disc formats, but it almost seems like they set this precedent that it has to be the format from now on.
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How much does it cost to produce the DS card format? Keep in mind, DS games sell for like $30 to $35 new. It can't be that expensive.
I'd imagine more than a standard DVD like the ones used on the 360... Which cost like what? 50 cents a whack or something?
A single dual layer DVD costs a few pennies, rather than ~£5 for the equivalent 8GB flash drive.
That doesn't account for Sony wanting to use the system to spread a media format, however.
Blu-Ray currently offers a vastly higher byte/$ ratio.
As an example, a 32GB USB flash drive runs roughly $75 retail on Newegg, while a dual-layer, 50GB Blu-Ray disc runs $6.60 (when purchased in bulk.)
Manufacturers will be paying reduced rates even over top of that, but I doubt the flash memory comes out ahead.
A disk is a piece of plastic with a huge industrial base ready to make them.
Cartridges/flashdrives are a billion times more complex to make and probably have less plants making them.
Pretty much this. I'd say digital distribution has a much better chance of becoming the dominant form of distribution some years down the road than cartridges.
But then you're basically looking at harddrives for storage anyhow.
Though I suppose the umd is still sort of a cart.
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But hard drives aren't technically carts bought for each game, they're a third medium separate from disks and carts. Carts don't require a hard drive, after all.
The DS uses carts because making a portable that uses regular DVDs is impossible. The UMD wasn't as cheap as a regular DVD-ROM.
Blu-Ray simply costs too much to make for it to be viable for much longer
Yet digitial distribution hasn't found a good way to let you download 30+gb yet. This goes for Blu ray movies and for video games, though I'm not sure how many games actually fill a blu-ray yet.
Huge game downloads do exist though. Siren PS3 is sold on the PSN and takes over 17GBs of space.
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Huh? You really think blu-rays are going to fade away now because the discs are too expensive? They only keep getting cheaper. I can't imagine anyone but maybe Nintendo using DVD next gen.
They exist, but I know a lot of people who just orded the blu-ray version so circumvent having to download all that data.
My Steam install disagrees with your assessment:
Saints Row 2 12 gigs
GTA IV 15 gigs
Mass Effect 11 gigs
Blu-Rays only cost a small amount more than a DVD to press and finish, and I'm sure that in a few years it'll be cheaper or the same price as DVDs are now. Also, the DS does not use a standardized "memory card", the cart itself is somewhat standard, but the actual storage in them can vary quite a bit. Also: Carts suck as copy protection, see the SNES, NES, Genesis, or such as an example. They may even make it easier to pirate, because all you have to do is make a cart with a rewritable storage area, and have the authorization codes for it to boot.
Fast load-times, no swapping, no fragility - the only current limitation is capacity, and of course that can only change.
Edit: and of course games don't really utilise the blu-ray format yet - I'd imagine that by the time they do, drive storage will have increased proportionately.
I think that's sort of his argument. Carts are a hard drive, sort of.
The two options are plastic optical disc that is non-writeable and prone to scratching, and digital data on a chip, whether it's a flash drive or a hard drive or a solid state drive.
So essentially, considering we're moving toward digital distribution models, you might as well say we are going back to carts, with a sufficiently broad definition of cart.
I guess if Henroid wants to see stuff like N64 cartridges, then no, probably not. Games on flash drives also seem prohibitively expensive. But in the broadest sense, yes, we are moving away from optical storage.
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DS cartridges are great for little kids, which is an enormous chunk of the Nintendo market. They're durable as fuck, so you don't have to worry about your 8 year old and his DS.
I'm pretty sure if you put a DS cartridge in the washer, it'd be perfectly fine once it dried out.
So long as there's no current going through the circuit as it goes, and there are no mineral deposits on the PCB once it dries out, it'll be fine.
As for the UMD, Sony should've learned with the minidisc that a CD in a cart doesn't really cut it, particularly with the PSP. Moving parts like that on a handheld system is a recipe for destruction, as well as requiring significantly more power to read. What I like about the DS carts is that you can both read and write, saving the need for a secondary storage device.
When purchased in bulk, USB flash drives are incredibly cheap too. Cheap enough to give away as a keychain.
Nothing physical at all? It will just be imaginary particles?
This proves what?
That you're willing to buy and download these games? Alrighty then.
Look considering there are things like Download Caps becoming more common and games are only getting larger in size and scope, i don't think a pure digital distribution situation is going to be viable for a long time.
You can have that now! Just close your eyes and imagine the halo 4!
I never asked for this!
Take a gander at how much bandwidth Steam servers are chewing thru in order to push game content out to people. Yeah great, you know a few people who chose to go to the store to buy something instead of waiting for a download, big fucking deal. GoG, Steam, D2D, and others have definitively proven that digital delivery is here, and not just for piddly little installs either.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Right, but that also relies on that your ISP provides unlimited bandwith use. There are a lot of ISPs out there that start charging after user hits their monthly limit.
You don't have a physical product. That's not going to fly in the mass market where people want to feel they are receiving something in exchange for their hard earned cash.
On the flip side, this is part of the reason so many people who would not steal a physical disc engage in digital piracy. When there's no physical product in hand, you don't really feel as though you've stolen anything. (Lets not take this statement to mean this is the ONLY reason people pirate digital goods).
There are other problems as well, such as ease of portability. I can bring a dvd over to a friend's house to watch it no problem but a DRM'd legally obtained film on my home media server is another story.
This is all kind of off topic.
Cartridges I'm sure will make at least another round in the hand held market. I don't see it happening anywhere else.
But you can easily bring a legally obtained film stored on a thumbdrive, or an iPod, or any number of other small devices without issue to a friends house and watch them.
Still faster than optical drives.
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Huh? No, it's a Nintendo-specific format, and we have homebrew because Nintendo can't seem to work out how the hell a cryptographic signature works (not that I'm complaining, mind you!)
Also, I'm no expert on Flash Drives, but with my experience with them they would have a load time if you ran a game off of the Flash Drive itself. It takes a while to transfer things from computer to Flash Drive and vice versa.
At the end of the day, cartridges don't generate as much revenue for the game developers/publishers and they take up too much space. I personally would like to see more games have an installation so they'd load a bit quicker, but I'm much happier with these short load times than I was with a gazillion SNES cartridges in a basket, sifting through them all trying to find the one I wanted to play.
Pretty sure it's because they don't care.
I mean look at how much money they make off the ds. They don't do updates to make it harder to pirate stuff or anything because it's like throwing a grain of sand into nintendo's lake of profit. It's not like they would earn more money by doing it so clearly it's just not worth the time to nintendo.
I never asked for this!