eli5: Why are games sold in disks? Wouldn’t usb drives be more efficient and save space on the console?
In: Technology
Discs are mass produced in factories, they cost pennies to make and they take seconds to be made (it’s like stamping a disc).
They’re easy to ship, either in paper/plastic envelope so super thin, easy to hide inside a paper manual or a small booklet, or you can put it in jewel case/box/whatever in a standardized size, again easy to ship.
An USB stick contains multiple parts (plastic case, metal connector, fiber glass circuit board, silicon chips like the flash memory chip and the controller chip).
Yeah there’s usb drives as small as a finger nail, but they still take time to be manufactured.
It takes more time to be programmed… you have to format the drive, test the flash memory cells and mark bad ones, then copy the information, check that the information was written correctly.
The drives can also be damaged by ESD … static electricity from your fingers getting close to the contacts inside the usb stick…. it’s super rare but it can still happen.
IF you make it super small, you may still have to use some bulky packaging .. imagine a finger nail sized usb stick flying around in a big Amazon box maybe getting stuck between the cardboard folds of the box and the person complaining the stick didn’t arrive. So, you end up with blister packs or big bulky packaging for the usb stick…
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