Is the Cartridge a BaD move for physical Media?

On 02/14/2017 at 10:15 PM by mothman

My vote is Hell no. Discs suck! and here's why.

1. They are fragile and if you have kids or are a drunk they will look like someone tap danced all over them in a matter of weeks.

2. A Blu Ray disc can hold 50 GB of Data that pales in comparison to what a tiny SD device can hold

3. Accessing data from static media is way faster than accessing data from a disc.

4. Digital sucks. You never actually own anything. Yes this is from someone who has purchased hundreds of digital games but mostly because they were on sale for next to nothing and I wanted to play them. If you can't sell it you don't own it.

5. OK that last one is kind of a tangent but it's still true.

6. If you can't build a high quality game on a 128 GB cart you really shouldn't be developing games. You should be working for Microsoft, a company whose motto is never write a thousand lines of code when a million will do.

We just chillin'

chilling pandas

Matt Snee Staff Writer

02/14/2017 at 10:37 PM

those are some lazy looking pandas.

Yeah, cartridges rule. Like I always say, you can leave a genesis game in the trunk of your car for a decade and it will still work.

jgusw

02/14/2017 at 10:41 PM

I agree with all of that.

SanAndreas

02/14/2017 at 11:22 PM

It's funny how we've come full circle on media - sort of.

When CD-ROMs first came out, they seemed like a godsend. 650MB of storage compared to 1.44MB for 3 1/2" floppies or 64MB for the biggest N64 cartridge ever made, the N64 port of Resident Evil 2. Heck, most HDDs at the time CD-ROMs came out sported less than 100MB. Nintendo's failure to embrace CD-ROMs is universally seen as the unforced error that handed the video game market to Sony for almost every generation from the 5th gen onward.

Now flash memory continues to decrease in price to where there are flash cards with the capacity of multiple Blu-Ray discs. BD-ROMs are still cheaper per GB, but that difference is rapidly fading and I don't see Sony or MS making much noise about using 4K Blu-Ray discs for games. Meanwhile, though discs have improved, their drawbacks are still evident.

Sony went from optical discs on the PSP to cartridges on the Vita. Nintendo is going from optical discs on the Wii U to cartridges on the Switch. Unless the next PlayStation or Xbox go digital only (assuming those machines ever come out, that is), I wouldn't be surprised to see them go to cartridges.

Super Step Contributing Writer

02/15/2017 at 12:08 AM

whose*

I have nothing to add but minute grammar corrections.

mothman

02/15/2017 at 10:10 AM

It's called not proofreading your own blogs. I also said I own hundreds of digital games and then went on to say how I don't really own them. I fixed that too.

02/15/2017 at 03:09 PM

"I'll fix YOU!" cried the panda as he morphed his Blu Ray player into a cartridge reader.

Halochief90

02/15/2017 at 02:40 AM

It also allows the Switch to be smaller, I imagine. Plus, those cartidges can be swapped faster than discs, again, I imagine.

Cary Woodham

02/15/2017 at 07:17 AM

It's amazing how cartridges are now being used, especially since CDs were big for so long. I prefer physical media anyway.

Nicoleb1989

02/15/2017 at 10:37 AM

Im quite glad they arent using disc anymore for the Switch. I definitly prefer carts over disc any day.

goaztecs

02/15/2017 at 12:12 PM

As someone who loves the disc format for music, I agree about what you wrote. I also love digital because the only space it takes up is on an external or the second hard drive in my laptop. Looking for used games on disc can be a pain because you finally find the one game you want just to check the disc and it looks like someone dragged it through rocks (I'm looking at you GameStop)

Machocruz

02/16/2017 at 01:33 PM

Cartridges are more fun

KnightDriver

02/22/2017 at 10:54 PM

Cartridges sound really good to me right now. Lasers go bad and discs get scratched. Drives stop working and you can scratch the disc by tipping the system while it's reading. Digital also sucks because, yea, you don't own it, really. Plus it has to install which is time consuming, the exact thing we should be beyond in 2017. Yes to cartridges!

PixlBit