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In the early days, cartridges were kinda like swapping out the RAM/SSD each time, pre-loaded with a game. Wasteful and expensive, even back then, but it was the best way to do it for the time.
There was a short while there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed, where you could keep the game files on optical media while still accessing it fast enough to have reasonable load times. BluRay and hdDVD increased the capacity, but not the read speed enough to match.
We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do, but switch games don't have 3d models and textures at the fidelity levels of other modern platforms.
With current technology, delivering digital media on a storage medium that has the performance to actually play from it, is kinda like gift cards. Like yeah, it'd be nice, but I'd rather just have the NVME storage drive/money so I can use it for whatever I want.
Maybe there will be another ultra cheap read-only storage medium one day, but right now, it's not a thing.
Interestingly, the performance aspect is one of the reasons some phone manufactures quote for removing the SD card slot. The gap between the performance of onboard storage and SD cards keeps growing, so people that add an SD card to their Android phone and store all their apps on it have a bad experience because the software isn't really designed with such slow storage in mind any more.
Maybe SD Express will help? There's still some issues with it and it's still expensive, but in theory it should be able to support 800+ MB/s read speeds. Not as fast as an NVMe drive of course, but faster than a SATA SSD.
Maybe the little storage cards from the Xbox Series X need to become a thing that's more widely used. I'd guess they're just M.2 2230 NVMe drives inside. Would be an interesting distribution mechanism for games (like a modern cartridge format) but they're just too expensive for that at the moment.
Like, sure, if I could buy a storage drive that just comes with a console game I want already on it, that could be cool.
But really, I'd rather have a plain drive than a drive that can only store that one game.
there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed
90% of the games didn't need that much storage. As someone growing up in a country with no copyright laws at the time, I was used to 100-200 games on a single CD. Then my dad got an official copy of MK Trilogy and I remember thinking how wasteful it was to use an entire CD for one game (you could physically see on the surface of the CD how much data was recorded on it, and it was mostly unused space).
Then there was the rare game that used not only the entire storage, but needed multiple CDs for the whole thing (e.g. Phantasmagoria).
We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do
Switch games get online updates too though. They're not much different from other platform games in that regard.
The overall issue being discussed is not physical media vs downloading games. It's the fact that the games you get are not a final playable version, but still need additional downloads to make them playable (zero-day patches are a norm these days).
I want this so much. I dream about making cartridges that are glorified PCIE NVME caddys and the slot on your console being essentially a PCIEx4 slot.
Maybe we could port some games and wrap them up as flatkpaks.
I'm just spit balling but it could work.
Why would you want that? Do you like getting gift cards instead of the money?
There's a reason storage media gets cheaper per byte as you go up in capacity, because 30 small drives with their own PCBs and controllers and ram-caches, instead of one big one, isn't better.
At most, I could get behind taking your memory card with you to a games store, and have them copy game files onto it from a local archive drive.
But who tf looks at all the BluRay boxes in the games section and thinks "these should all have an entire SSD in them." At least optical media only distributes the actual storage component, all read/write components are in the drive.
Maybe the blue ray box should have an entire SSD in them or some kind of NextGen Compact flash as long as it's a standard format and not a proprietary format like a switch game. You can buy blank CDs, DVDs, SD cards and there are standards in place to make them readable by entire fleets of devices.
It's harder for games but I'm coming at this from a games preservation angle.
Games keep getting bigger and require installation to drive to effectively load assets quickly. I really envy the ability to not have to perform an installation to the device. If your game was simply its own storage device again then you could have that plug and play like experience back and also have that ~4GBps read that even the cheapest NVME drives can offer.
I have DVDs, but I also have MKV files, and I have the ability to go between these formats. I suggested something like flatpak because a universal physical media image format for games would be just one more way to easily preserve content offline indefinitely and neatly keep it pretty platform agnostic.
That was my train of thought. I know the likelihood of this being done by a real company is slim to none because of DMCA and over engineering another format is pointless if they can force everything to be download only IRL but I would like to push back and I can't easily archive all this stuff forever on an ever growing 48TB Nas on my home. I would like offline ownership and convenience please.
If it's going to be too expensive for a company to put Alan Wake Two onto physical media then I'd like a way to do it myself so it continues to work when epic decides they want to pull a Warner Bros and rip it off the internet forever and claim it was a loss to get tax breaks. It would also be cool if it didn't have to install and it just started.
I understand the difficulty involved with that but we're halfway there with software running containerized on Linux.
A man can dream.
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How would what you're suggesting be any improvement from that NAS you have?
You cite games preservation, but you're essentially suggesting we do what some YouTubers do, storing all their footage on a bunch of individual usb drives.
Installation is just moving files.
Having a bunch of small drives instead of a large performant and redundant storage volume is not a good way to avoid having to move files onto the system where you want to run something.
You want the fast performance, but the faster the drives get, the less reason there is to move the physical drive instead of just the files.
Optical media makes sense when your internet is so slow, it's faster to read a disk. That isn't the case for some anymore. My connection could download/install a cracked copy of Alan Wake 2 in less than 20 minutes. Why would I prefer to go out and buy a tiny 86gb SSD to accomplish the same?
You want games to come on hardware so fast you don't need to install them, but that same hardware would allow installing to be so fast it wouldn't bother anyone anymore. And by then why would we store everything on individual loose drives, instead of redundant live storage?
If you need to get data from A to B, but there isn't a fiber connection between them, that's an argument for either disposable optical media, or taking a loose drive to A, loading it up with the data, taking it to B, then dumping the data. What it's not, is an argument for storing everything on those loose drives. That's the worst of bad practice.