eli5: Why are games sold in disks? Wouldn’t usb drives be more efficient and save space on the console?
In: Technology
Optical discs aren’t that much different than records. The basic technology to make them goes back over a century. You shoot liquid plastic into a master mold that has the data etched on it. That cools, you slap a shiny layer on top to reflect the laser light, and you’re done. Blu-ray discs are dirt cheap to manufacture in large quantities.
Flash storage uses microchips to store data. These are more expensive to manufacture. It requires specialized equipment and clean rooms. Plus making high capacity chips is more art than science. There’ll be a lot of rejects.
To put this into perspective, you can buy a pack of 50 name brand, high speed BD-R discs for about $50 USD. Since each of those discs can hold 25GB, that’s 4 cents a gigabyte. Yeah, these are blank, but the steps to make pre-recorded media aren’t much different.
Newegg has a name brand 256GB USB flash drive right now for just $35. That’s 13 cents per gigabyte. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s still three times the cost of those BD-R discs. That cost adds up over bulk production runs.
Now, some game consoles do use Flash storage. Namely the Nintendo Switch. But the cost of storage is why a lot of physical releases for that system still require a sizable download. The larger capacity cards are expensive and cut into profits. Blu-ray is a much more cost effective solution. Even though the discs are a lot slower than Flash, you’re really only going to be transferring data off them once in a blue moon, as most consoles install games to internal storage now anyway. Flash only makes sense for something like the Switch, since it’s a portable, battery powered console. Thus it benefits from having as few moving parts as necessary.
Of course all of this is becoming moot as digital sales take over. Having the customer download the data is cheaper than any physical media, since there’s no shipping costs or retail overhead associated with it.
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