going optical?

[Dulcimer]

Will Nintendo make the move away from carts to an optical format for the GBevolution? Should nintendo make this change?

[Skye McCloud]

No, I doubt they will, and the PSP is only standing reason why.

Sure, they get a lot more space and crap, but let's face it: There's a big difference in home gaming and handheld gaming. Some load times are fine, but only in home gaming. In a handheld, you're on the move, you shouldn't have to wait for the crap to load.

As well, using discs also drains battery life a lot faster. I'd rather take less storage, no load times, and more battery life.

[Kerii]

There's little point to going optical in both business and practical senses.

Sony just uses optical discs because they "look cool" (like they started with the PSX, hardly necessary given the size of games back then, though it did result in a longer console upgrade cycle (a good thing, sort of)), and to sell PSP movies that usually have a longer playtime than the PSP has batterytime.

An optical drive requires a motor, and a motor chews up batteries like no tommorow. Flash-ROM is coming down at a fairly decent rate nowadays, though nowhere near as cheap as CD or DVD media, the fact that they're a major pain in the ass to pirate (for "casual" pirates at any rate) makes bootlegs less prevalent, and that equates to less lost profits.

And like stated above, no load times.

For home consoles though, the amount of data needed for games unfortunately requires the use of optical media as using Flash-ROM would jack the price up to insane proportions.