Do you think we will ever go back to cartridges?

[Rubbereon]

Games are becoming increasingly bigger, so much bigger that they take 2 discs to install and more frustratingly they are installed directly onto the console. I don't know what the technology old cartridges used, but modern cartridges could use hdd or ssd.

The advantages are numerous:

• Game devs can format and encrypt the drive to prevent piracy (you can do that with blu-rays, but the standard technology can be bypassed fairly easy, aes-256 and luks would be harder to crack on top of that Microsoft owns bitlocker, so they could use that to encrypt xbox games)
• Update patches and save files could go directly on the drive instead of sapping a console's space, helping make changes more permanent
• Lmk if I'm wrong, but Blu-rays can hold a maximum 100GB of data. Clearly this is not enough with Unreal slop taking way more space. The cheapest hard drive has a capacity of 250GB.
• They could make theire proprietary filesystem which wouldmake reading the drives on anything, but the console extremely inconvenient.
• Lastly, if a game takes too much memory, the drive could offload some of that memory like a paging file on windows or a swap file on linux.

The biggest disadvantage of using a drive instead of a disc for storing games is the disc is a rom (read only memory) meanwhile drives are meant to be edited. This is only really a problem due to hacking, but hackers can still mod and hack anyway because the game on disc gets downloaded onto the console womp womp wooomp! People at Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo really didn't think this through. So the one downside already exists regardless, really they should just drop optical drives for hdd/ssd slots and make the lives of everybody better.

Oh and because this is something that someone might ask, no the fact discs are rom don't prevent them from being copied (a computer can copy anything it can read, it's just writing directly into the disc that's impossible), so the developers must encrypt  and format them to make them as hard to read by computers as possible.

[Dan Q]

Sadly, no. Economy of scale means that commodity digital media like DVDs and Blu-Rays get cheaper and cheaper, but cartridges - which at a minimum contain a PCB and a ROM chip and if they're to provide actual benefits like integrated storage space then they need more too. Yes, I suppose they could be SDDs (connected via e.g. eSATA or similar) but those are still going to cost an order of magnitude more per-unit than an optical disc.

Encryption doesn't help much, because the difficult bit in counter-piracy isn't the quality of the encryption (there's absolutely nothing to stop you making a Bitlocker volume and copying it to a Blu-Ray today), but the security of the cryptographic keys. In the end: the console has to be able to decrypt it... so that's what crackers will attack! When you're trying to break encryption, it's almost-never sensible to attack it directly (all modern encryption is pretty bulletproof) but instead to attack the place the keys are stored... and with a console, any keys need to be installed in a box that you deliver to the customer's house!

But crucially: the "sweet spot" for big game producers falls somewhere that economy of scale and anti-piracy measures meet: digital downloads. Digital download platforms are cheaper still to run that distributing optical media, and because they require an Internet connection they make consumers get used to those (insidious) "always-online" and "phone home" anti-piracy systems. Switching to cartridges is two-steps less-economical than digital downloads, and necessarily makes piracy easier as well as creating a "resale market" (which producers also dislike).

So yeah: I fear there's no market for a return to cartridges.

Which is a shame, because some of them were amazingly clever. Sonic & Knuckles 3 for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive allowed you to insert a cartridge of another game in the franchise into a secondary port, to unlock extra features. The Game Boy Camera was a cartridge with an integrated peripheral: a (terrible) digital camera! Micro Machines 2's cartridge had extra controller ports built-in to it so using it upgraded your console to support four-player games. And a handful of Nintendo portable cartridges had features like accelerometers, tilt-switches, sort-of foreshadowing what would become the Wiimote by allowing you to "jiggle" your GBA to interact with it!

Cartridges were great, but other media becoming widespread (plus the pressure to pivot to digital downloads) means that they're probably not coming back, I'm afraid.