Media
From GameWiki
Contents |
Overview
The media in which the game is presented has changed over the years significantly. While at first cartridges were favored, their expensive manufacturing did not value over their fast loading times. At the release of Sony's PlayStation which was the first very sucessful system that used CD's as media, Nintendo released their latest version Nintendo 64 again with cartridges. The shift to optical media came then faster as consoles merged together with DVD Players and the production of those media became cheaper in the masses. Today non-physical distribution methods such as Valve|Valve's Steam online distribution. Also Electronic Arts has been pushing the envelope now with the release of its EA Downloader that first was seen in the release of Battlefield 2: Special Forces. All in all, the non-physicals are progressing fast. Which is a good thing for the customer as it means less waste of packaging, faster access to the games itself, easy patch management and of course, smaller prices of the games itself.
Cartridges
Plastic enveloped circuit boards, with a few chips on it that stored the actual game. Popular in the area of 32-bit and pre consoles, it only can hold itself today in the portable market such as the Gameboy.
Magnetic
3,5 Floppy Disks and 5,25 Floppy Disks were a big hit. The general ease that allowed the users to move data from one place to another and their small sizes gave them their success. The biggest problems they had were their fragility in construction, specially the big 5,25 ones and that they lost data too quickly because of their magnetic properties.
Optical
CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and Mini-DVD-ROM have taken over from magnetic and cartridge ages. With upcoming Blueray and HD-DVD their capacity will increase even higher and allow more detailed content to be brought to the gamers.
Sony's Playstation Portable uses a special format of discs.
Non Physical
The age of internet and broadband is upon us. Where ten years ago we waited half an hour for a 100 kilobyte picture, we can download two fullsized games from one of the services that supply them.
Steam by Valve was introduced with the popular mod to Half-Life called Counter-Strike. At the time cursed, it evolved quickly and survived its first big test with the release of Half-Life 2.
EA Downloader by Electronic Arts introduced the service with the downloadable release of Battlefield 2: Special Forces.
