Game Storage Medium

Storage media is used in a number of ways the most popular way is in the case of gaming, being used to store different games ranging from football to shooters. Since the start of gaming platforms the consoles has often had a different type of storage device like in the case of magnavox odyssey which had pong installed onto it, the Atari 2700 having cartridges that were inserted into the game console itself, while in the case of the Playstation 3 which used blue ray disks.
They use different storage media because they use the best possible storage media from when they were built meaning that as time progresses that the storage media will always change. This is made very clear when you look at the Sega Genesis using CD-Roms while its main rival the SNES used cartridges.
 This was mainly due to the SNES coming out before the Genesis so cartridge was the best possible but by the time that the Genesis came out CD-Roms had began to be seen as the most better media storage.

ROM cartridges themselves have been used for game consoles since the start of home gaming in 1972 with the Magnavox Odyssey, which had a removable circuit board that could be used to change the game elements (this wasn't paid much attention to because not many people have the software to recode the console to do anything other than simple pong).
Cartridges as a game storage device made its stride with the birth of the Atari 2600, this console had an huge library of games all stored on cartridges. This was because the technology used to create these advances cartridges was a lot cheaper so anyone that had the equipment was able to create a game (this did lead to a large number of bad games and because Atari hadn't kept any sort of track of the games that were used on these consoles many had huge glitches).
As the generations of consoles went on, one company continued to use cartridges right up till the fifth generation. Nintendo were the last company to use cartridges with these console Nintendo 64.

The piece of technology that replaces the ROM cartridge is the CD-ROM. CD-ROM stands for Compact Disc - Random-Only Memory. This worked by a small laser being reflected of the disc. The disc itself would have a large number of tiny different indents. These indents were meant to work as the same way as binary works with a simple yes or no result. The only difference is instead off 1s or 0s it was either risen or indented but the computer reads it the same way. These CDs took over from ROM-cartridges due to them being much cheaper and have the ability to store between 650mb - 700mb. This new way of storing games first began replacing game cartridges with the SEGA Genesis. This console was the first of its kind because to try and increase its like span SEGA created a large number of different attachments for it, in an attempt to keep it up to date with the model and rapidly increasing technology. This storage media failed to last as many generations as its predecessors the cartridges.

As time went on technology once again improved. The next big jump for game storage devices was with the Digital Versatile Disc or DVD for short. This storage device became well known during the 6th generation of consoles with the PlayStation and the original Xbox. This device worked the same as a normal CD-ROMs. The reason that they were much better than there predecessors is because while CD-ROMs storage around 650mb to 700mb but the much more advanced DVD stored 4.7GBs on both sides of the disc meaning that companies were able to store much more detailed games on there consoles. This storage device is still used today but only in one major console  the Xbox 360.

As of late 2013 the largest time of storage media is the Blue-Ray disc much more advanced than any DVD it was capable of storing 25GBs on each side. The first time this was used in a console was during the 7th generation in the PS3, with the arrival of the 8th generation of consoles both sony and Microsoft both instead for the Xbox one and the PS4 to use Blue-Ray.