The economics don’t work out - you have remember, optical discs are dirt cheap. Sony barged into the console market by guaranteeing any randos that passed certification could press as many copies as they wanted, with three days of lead time, for a dollar apiece. N64 cartridges cost ten bucks empty and you wouldn’t get them for a month.
There is a reason Nintendo Power never had Game Boy demos glued to the front cover.
For Baldur’s Gate 3, that third disc might be more expensive than the first two combined, because they have to spend some extra cents on a case with the flappy middle part.
Do you have any idea how much more expensive flash storage is compared to discs? There’s a reason cartridge based gaming systems are limited to handheld nowadays. An 8GB switch cartridge costs about as much as a 50GB Bluray, from what I’ve read. And a 32GB card about 60% more. And the switch cartridges don’t exactly use SSD quality NAND chips and controllers, which would be needed for the ever growing need of SSD speeds on current gen hardware.
So unless you’re fine with paying double for your games, don’t expect them to come on high quality cartridges any time soon, especially if we’re talking about games over 100GB, which are getting more and more prominent.
Physical games should just be read only ssd or similar at this point. Maybe with a writable partition for updates and transferrable saves.
So a cartridge?
The economics don’t work out - you have remember, optical discs are dirt cheap. Sony barged into the console market by guaranteeing any randos that passed certification could press as many copies as they wanted, with three days of lead time, for a dollar apiece. N64 cartridges cost ten bucks empty and you wouldn’t get them for a month.
There is a reason Nintendo Power never had Game Boy demos glued to the front cover.
For Baldur’s Gate 3, that third disc might be more expensive than the first two combined, because they have to spend some extra cents on a case with the flappy middle part.
Do you have any idea how much more expensive flash storage is compared to discs? There’s a reason cartridge based gaming systems are limited to handheld nowadays. An 8GB switch cartridge costs about as much as a 50GB Bluray, from what I’ve read. And a 32GB card about 60% more. And the switch cartridges don’t exactly use SSD quality NAND chips and controllers, which would be needed for the ever growing need of SSD speeds on current gen hardware.
So unless you’re fine with paying double for your games, don’t expect them to come on high quality cartridges any time soon, especially if we’re talking about games over 100GB, which are getting more and more prominent.