Media used with game consoles

A gaming console by itself is of very little value, to get any use out of it you need to have games to play. This is why the media that is used with game consoles is so important. Over the years there have been surprisingly few types of media used, this is largely because one dominated the market for the first twenty years that consoles were available.

In the early days of game consoles by far the most commonly used media was the cartridge. This consisted of a printed circuit board inside of a plastic case that could be plugged into the console. The cartridge was introduced with the first games in the mid seventies and would remain the industry standard for the next two decades. The reason for this was in part that until the mid-ninties a cartridge could hold more information than other types of media were capable of. The other reason for it was that the use of a printed cirtuit board allowed for coprocessor that increased the consoles power. In addition you could add components to the circuit board that increased that extended the consoles functionality if that was necessary for the game.

In the mid-ninties cartridges started to fall out of favour of optical media. In the early days this was almost exclusively through the use of CD-ROM's. The main reason for the change from cartridges was that it was much cheaper to produce a game on a CD than it was on a cartridge. By the early part of the twenty first century the CD-ROM had been replaced by the DVD-Rom allowing for increased data storage and therefore more complex games. The DVD has now largely been replaced by the BluRay which allows for even more data storage.

Over the last few years the makers of gaming consoles have started to take advantage of the internet as a way to distribute their games. In the early days this meant that people would save the games onto a hard drive or flash memory so that they could use them on their console. Nowadays however it is possible to play the games online. In addition you can also download a great deal besides games with television shows and movies being the most popular options.

The advantage of distributing games online is that it is much more convenient but it does also create a bit of a problem for the game makers. Online distribution makes it much easier for the games to be pirated which is a major problem throughout the industry. As a result you can expect that at some point in the future the console makers will figure out a way to distribut their games in a way that makes this more difficult and a new media will be developed for gaming consoles.