[PaulHoule]

Funny how 'cartridges' beat out discs in the long term in the since that flash memory has eaten everything.

There was this short time in the 1990s when everybody and his brother were inventing some kind of 'disc', for instance there were the magneto-optical discs like the audio Minidisc (love 'em but my Net MD recorder just died) and the MO disc used by the NeXT cube and then there were the "floptical" discs like the ZIP disks and the N64 DD disc.

Writable and rewritable optical discs dropped in price more quickly than anyone thought possible and not long after that, USB flash drives and SD cards where everywhere.

Most portable game consoles since 2010 have been flash-based, often with some kind of modified SD card (e.g. Vita, Nintendo Switch.) I just bought a 256 GB SD card for $20 which is bigger than any commercialized disc even if it is a little pricey for software distribution.

And of course stationary consoles are going towards digital distribution, you can buy a digital PS5 now and a digital XBOX is coming soon and ultimately the storage is... Flash.