Cartridge Return
I, like many people, welcomed compact discs as the video game medium to replace cartridges.
They were thin, shiny, and fit the vision of utopian futurists.
The benefits included high storage and low and production costs.
But unlike CDs, cartridges were durable and data loading was instant.
How important was storage though?
Did game prices go down with the reduced production costs of CDs?
Not where I shop.
That’s because the cost of cartridges was absorbed by the publishers.
In truth, a video game’s retail price is seldom a function of production costs.
And I doubt retailers were repelled by the idea of gamers re-purchasing games that had been fatally scratched.
Flash memory prices are tanking and I predict a return of the cartridge.
Portable electronics flash memory cards sell for about $10 a gig.
Don’t forget flash memory is re-writable so we can throw away those console memory cards and hard drives.
