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you can easily end up with customers having broken installations that you can't fix

I sometimes wonder if games were distributed on cartridge again if they would be more thoroughly tested before being released.

Plus, they'd load a brazillion times faster.

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TBH, I think that cartridges in this case could be replaced by USB thumb drive keys... effectively a 128GB USB drive with a hardware key, and maybe even an embedded OS. Updates download and apply into the Key. Take it with you, run on any common x86 system, it could be great.

Consumer expectations of scope, game length, release time tables, DLC, etc. have made this an impossibility.

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