Okay peeps. Maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part, but bear with me here.

Due to the fast evolution in solid state drives in recent years, I can totally see video games being released on cartridges again in the future. Of course, now it would be commercially impossible due to the high price of SSDs. But if their popularity was to rise, their prices would drop substantially. Just look at stuff like CompactFlash cards. A couple of years ago, they were expensive as hell. Now you can get a 2 gig card for less than €15 in retail.

Think of all the good things this could bring. Much faster access rates, smaller media, no installation, instant loading times, no disc scratches, etc. It would also make consoles themselves cheaper and more reliable because they wouldn't need hard drives anymore. It would make copy protection much easier, as it can be integrated into the hardware of the cartridge itself.

More info on SSDs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-9888760-64.html

I could go for that. I grew up with them and never had any complaints. The majority of the time they were FAR more reliable than CD's ever were.

Kinda OT but I used to love switching the plastic cases around the games with others to confuse people. I took Super Mario 3 and TMNT game and switched the actual game chips around so when my brother put in Mario he ended up loading up the Ninja Turtles. I also did this to this kid that I didn't like except I ended up just switching his shit all around to where I didn't even remember which games I switched with which. I wish I could've seen his face

Yeah I would go for that... sounds a lot more practical than downloading every game...

I think it would still be nice to have a dedicated HDD in a console though, useful for lots of stuff. But yeah, SSD cartridges would be cool I think! It would be cool to get a blank cartridge and install Linux to it, so you could just pop the cartridge in and load Linux on your game system, instead of having to dual boot like on the PS3.

piracy would be harder, fuck cartridges, it would be harder to fuck hard working developers with them

You sick bastard, I wouldn't even do that to hitler.

Well if piracy wasn't a problem we might get some more original games ey?

You want new carts? Have 'em. http://www.piersolar.com/

because hitler didn't play games.

I thought heavily about this about 6 months ago. How awesome it would be if everything ran like the nintendo DS does, on small cards. Buy movies, music, and games all on small SD-style cards, ensuring their existance for a long time.

Your CD deck in your car could sport a small SD slot for transporting music, maybe have a small hard drive and allow rewinding and fastforwarding of the radio, kinda like a DVR.

And ultimately, after the SD card stage, I think everything will be available for instant download, so you don't even have to worry about looking for and loading a program. just type in the name and click

instant satisfaction

Yeah, SSDs would be great for gaming...Especially with the fast read speeds. No more texture pop in or the engine stuttering trying to read the data off a disk.