But CD-ROM is another story entirely. However, even this approach costs a great deal of money. The economics just don't support such development costs. To earn back a development investment of a million dollars, you'd need to sell several hundred thousand units. Interactivity, the essence of the game experience, springs from process intensity, not data intensity.
Data can support and enhance the gaming experience, but it plays a secondary role.
Processing is the core of a game, and CD-ROM does not enhance processing one whit. You can't interact with data. You can't play with it. The concept of process intensity is a rarefied one, and some people are all to ready to reject what they don't understand. To make matters worse, I have done a lousy job explaining it, partly because I don't fully grasp the concept myself.