Except they have to calculate the cost of hosting said files such as security, server costs, and etc. which does ending up costing something although it is normally better if only because the issues regarding distribution are gone.For home consoles, it's cheaper to use optical media (or digital downloads, completely eliminates costs)
Except they have to calculate the cost of hosting said files such as security, server costs, and etc. which does ending up costing something although it is normally better if only because the issues regarding distribution are gone.
Games don't run off of optical media. PS4 and XBOne games are stored on them. You install them to your HDD, where they are then played from, updated to, etc. Discs are considerably cheaper than flash memory, and these manufacturers would have to either make games on flash media large enough to accommodate all of these updates, or you'd still be running part of the game off of the HDD anyway. So it really wouldn't change things very much.
Back in the 80's and early 90's games weren't big at all, so dumping them on a CD would be a waste of storage space on CDs.
Games only became bigger as the 3D era approached, Playstation 1 and Saturn? where the ones to understand it that you best could sacrifice some load time for increased play time in games, not to mention bigger worlds, better music, better graphics.
Carts back then where still severely limited (as ROM space was really expensive)
Except they have to calculate the cost of hosting said files such as security, server costs, and etc. which does ending up costing something although it is normally better if only because the issues regarding distribution are gone.
Also the cost further increased for NAND based 1GB chip vs BD-Disk, for example and for simplicity, for an 8GB game, they would require 8 1GB flash chip or an 8GB flash chip thus costing them 35-40¢ per units vs still 4¢ BD-Disk as the 8GB per unit can easily fit into a 50 or even a single layer 25GB BD-Disc.Production costs.
Flash based storage might be "cheap" but if you're talking about millions of them...
Lets say that a 1 GB flash chip costs 5 cents, a 50 GB Blu-ray costs 4 cents (both to produce)
Take both and multiply it by a million.
For home consoles, it's cheaper to use optical media (or digital downloads, completely eliminates costs) and handhelds, it's best to have flash based media.
The PSP was an experiment with optical media, it wasn't that successful tho.
Also the cost further increased for NAND based 1GB chip vs BD-Disk, for example and for simplicity, for an 8GB game, they would require 8 1GB flash chip or an 8GB flash chip thus costing them 35-40¢ per units vs still 4¢ BD-Disk as the 8GB per unit can easily fit into a 50 or even a single layer 25GB BD-Disc.
Lets say that a 1 GB flash chip costs 5 cents, a 50 GB Blu-ray costs 4 cents (both to produce)
But is this flash chip just ROM like what is expected in the cartridges, or is it rewritable? In so many gross comparisons, the latter is typically used against a write-once DL BR disc without a single thought to equality of the comparison.
I was simply referring to current gen hardware. Of course older machines actually played the games from discs. The issue though, is that devs may or may not have actually finished the game before it was pressed. There were plenty of buggy, hot messes out there before the invention of the 360 and PS3.The Wii used discs and didn't have a hard disk, so developers were forced to finish their games before they sold them. The same thing could happen with a read only cartridge.
Production costs.
Flash based storage might be "cheap" but if you're talking about millions of them...
Lets say that a 1 GB flash chip costs 5 cents, a 50 GB Blu-ray costs 4 cents (both to produce)
Take both and multiply it by a million.
For home consoles, it's cheaper to use optical media (or digital downloads, completely eliminates costs) and handhelds, it's best to have flash based media.
The PSP was an experiment with optical media, it wasn't that successful tho.
Add to that that games back then on the SNES era were all uncompressed or very mildly compressed so the data could be used directly while now days the data is always compressed and can't be used right away, this is to make the most out of the limited capacity of the storage medium. Metal Gear 4 is the prime example of it, needing to uncompress big amounts of data every chapter.As far as the rest of this discussion is going, even if the price of NAND was somehow even close to being on par with optical discs, it's still not as fast as reading from HDD. SSD drives combine multiple NAND chips with DRAM and special controller chips to achieve their speed. The thing that made old school cartridge games so special is that the console could essentially swap data from the cartridge to the internal system RAM almost instantly, making it act almost like RAM extension (and that's exactly what happens with the Saturn 4 meg cart). Making cartridge ROMs that can hot swap at data speeds in newer consoles, while do-able, isn't something that we, as gamers, are going to want to pay for. It would be a Neo-Geo situation all over again.
The Switch will fail to entice third-party developers because it's a low-power Tegra-based tablet, storage is the least of its worries. It's a major step up from the 3DS, but with the Pro and Scorpio on the horizon with multiple teraflops of computational power under their hoods it will be left it the dust, that's just how the cookie crumbles.Costs aside the way modern game devs roll out patches, DLC and so on there is literally no point in using cartridges. Sure you would have some fast access on a cartridge for the day one data of the game but you would still need gigs and gigs of HDD space for the patches, dlc and updates. If at the end of the day only half the data you are using for running your game is coming from the cartridge and the rest is coming from a hdd how can you justify using a cart? You might as well just go with a cheap BR and dump everything to a cheap hdd and save money all round.
This is actually why I think the Switch will fail to entice as much third party support as people think it will bring. I can not see the Switch having a lot of onboard storage, maybe 32gb-128gb max plus maybe another 256gb with an sd card. Games are only getting bigger these days, COD Infinite warfare has a disclaimer that it will use up to 130gb of HDD space and most games on PS4 and X1 weigh in at least 40gb+ with any patches and dlc adding more. I can not see the Switch's carts supporting games of this size and I cannot see the Switches's internal storage being enough for DLCs and patches. I think ultimately the lack of a HDD will cripple any cross platform potential the Switch has as third party devs will just not bother going to the effort of catering to yet another gimped Nintendo console who's core userbase are hostile to those sort of AAA mainstream games anyway.