It wasn’t a big deal. A bit annoying but also kind of cool that you could carry a memory card and use it with a different console and different copy of the game and still pick up where you left off.
But technically that was an advantage of cartridges, even if it wasn’t a financially significant one.
Feels more like a wash to me. The big advantage of cartridges was the lack of load time. I don’t think anything else really lines up in the “advantages” column for the format.
Wasn’t another advantage of cartridges the relative difficulty of piracy?
Yes, it was, and it also made consoles a bit cheaper, because the hardware to read a ROM card is cheaper than the hardware to read an optical disk. Less failure-prone, too, unless you do like Nintendo did with the NES and fuck that part up entirely by making it front-loading and over-complicated instead of top-loading and rock-simple.
It makes individual games more expensive, however, because there’s less economy of scale for some proprietary cartridge design than there is for the compact disk format.
I’m happy with the Switch cartridge mechanism. It seems simple and they are postage-stamp tiny so portability isn’t an issue. The other good thing is the resale value. I bought “Doom” for £40 and reckon I’ll easily get £35 back for it on ebay