Next gen consoles - return to cartridges?

[Darren S]

Just a discussion header, really. Do you think consoles would ever go full circle and revert back to the cartridge days of old?

Removing the cost of cartridge manufacturing out of the equation, I think there would be several benefits....

• Fewer moving parts - possible decrease in size of the console unit?
• Literally uncapped storage capacity
• Potential to patch the game with the cartridge's own EPROM?
• Faster loading times?

I think with the stupidly low cost of optical drives now and the non-exisitant cost of optical media would be the biggest hurdles, though.

D.

 

[Henry]

the modern machines are multi-media though - they'd not want to build something that had to play DVDs/Blueray (or whatever the fudge is going on with that stuff now-a-days) AND load cartridges. imo

 

[LegoHead]

I think everything will be moving towards solid state. Entire devices being produced in one lump. So yes I think we will return to cartridges. The life of mechanical devices is obviously much less than a solid state device.

Everything is becoming more portable....

 

[Darren S]

^^^^ - good point, Henry. And there would be no way that releasing the latest films on cartridges would be cost effective. Then again, the price and capacity of camera memory cards are cheap these days. Imagine getting high quality DVD releases on something the size of a micro-SD card!

D.

 

[RichRSi]

Too expensive to produce and less profit because of this. The casing, board, ROM's, lable, manufacture, packaging, carriage (because it weighs more) sourcing all the parts from seperate companies to bring together for production is all going to cost more than a little shiney disk with a lable and the info burned on to it.

 

[timmmah]

I think the future is downloading of games onto a hard drive on the console. Even a solid state hard drive as theres no moving parts.

Already is popular with music and movies.

 

[sn00p]

Zero chance. As said above, it costs them fractions of pennies to manufacture a game on optical media. There would be zero benefit from being cartridge based again.

With internet connectivity and built in storage on the console itself, they could achieve fix/patch systems without any problem.

Consoles typically are loss leaders, i.e they sell them at a loss (at least after initial release) because they make money on software.

 

[Steve2004]

Apart from the faster loading times, cartridges are inferior in every way to optical media (now that consoles have HDDs) and will never come back.

 

[clio__chris]

i dont care as long as they dont break
(had rrod last night and quite annoyed!)

used to love the cartridges on the old mega drive but agree they're very unlikely to return.