It was a tradeoff. Cartridges cost a lot more but they made piracy a lot harder and loading times nonexistent. In retrospect it seems like a bad move but it cou

It was a tradeoff. Cartridges cost a lot more but they made piracy a lot harder and loading times nonexistent. In retrospect it seems like a bad move but it could have gone the other way. Ironically, thanks to FPGAs we can now pirate cartridge games on the original hardware easily and without modification, while the situation with disc-based consoles is somewhat trickier. Meanwhile, physical console game distribution has swung back to solid-state media since optical discs simply can't match the capacity or speed.