3 ms·

The whole world took a wrong turn when we moved away from physical media.

• breve 11mo ago
  Hard drives and optical discs are the reason they duplicated the data. The duplicated the data to reduce load times.
  • habbekrats 11mo ago
    do they even sell disc of these game?...
    • jsheard 10mo ago
      They do, but it's irrelevant to performance nowadays since you're required to install all of the disc data to the SSD before you can play. The PS3/360 generation was the last time you could play games directly from a disc (and even then some games had an install process).
      • Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
        I believe even then it was already "most", at least for the PS3; that was the era where always-online devices became the norm, where game developers were more eager to release patches after release, etc.
• tetris11 11mo ago
  In terms of ownership, yes absolutely. In terms of read/write speeds to physical media, the switch to an SSD has been unsung gamechanger. That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn
  • BizarroLand 11mo ago
    I hate it when you buy a physical game, insert the disk, and immediately have to download the game in order to play the game because the disk only contains a launcher and a key. Insanity of the worst kind.
    • crest 10mo ago
      Or the launch day patch is >80% the size of the game, but I don't want to go back to game design limited by optical media access speeds.
    • hbn 10mo ago
      Nintendo is pretty good for putting a solid 1.0 version of their games on the cartridges on release. But on the other hand, the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long as they keep the servers online so you could download a digital purchase. I've kinda given up on physical games at this point. I held on for a long time, but the experience is just so bad now. They use the cheapest, flimsiest, most fragile plastic in the cases. You don't get a nice instruction manual anymore. And honestly, keeping a micro SD card in your system that can hold a handful of games is more convenient than having to haul around a bunch of cartridges that can be lost. I take solace in knowing that if I do still have a working Switch in 20 years and lose access to games I bought a long time ago, hopefully the hackers/pirates will have a method for me to play them again.
      • wtallis 10mo ago
        > the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long You've been paying attention to the wrong sources for information about NAND flash. A new Switch cartridge will have many years of reliable data retention, even just sitting on a shelf. Data retention only starts to become a concern for SSDs that have used up most of their write endurance; a Switch cartridge is mostly treated as ROM and only written to once.
        • hbn 10mo ago
          What's "many years"? I've read about people's 3DS cartridges already failing just sitting on a shelf.
          • 10mo ago
  • crote 10mo ago
    > That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn Cartridges were also crazy expensive. A N64 cartridge cost about $30 to manufacture with a capacity of 8MB, whereas a PS1 CD-ROM was closer to a $1 manufacturing cost, with a capacity of 700MB. That's $3.75/MB versus $0.0014/MB - over 2600x more expensive! Without optical media most games from the late 90s & 2000s would've been impossible to make - especially once it got to the DVD era.
  • Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
    Maybe, but I'd argue the on-board storage chips literally an inch away from the CPU / GPU of the PS5 are faster these days. But in between cartridge consoles and fast hard drive consoles there was a disk-based gap where seek times were an issue.
• jayd16 10mo ago
  The (de)-optimization exists, essentially, because of physical media.