Current gen games can’t be played from standard external storage. You could put the game there, but it would have to be moved to internal memory to play it.
You can’t compare current generations to previous because starting with the PS3/Xbox 360 the generations became artificially extended.
With no no new impending hardware, there’s no impetus to reduce prices and clear stock.
The OG Xbox 360 launched with a 20 GB hard drive (2005). That got a price cut when the 60 GB version was announced (2008) and that coincided with the much more expensive “Elite” with 120 GB. Similarly that had a price cut when the 250 GB version came out in 2009.
I had one, I had the tape drive for the Commodore 64 as well.
The Supercharger back in the day wasn’t that expensive, about $70 or the price of 2 games, because you had to supply your own tape player, the supercharger just connected to it with a wire.
I feel the opposite when I hear people complain about load times… “We want you to buy our SSD so your game will boot in 11 seconds instead of 19 seconds!”
Son, let me tell you about loading games from casette tape.
You’d start it loading, get up and go have dinner with the family. After 30 minutes, maybe it would be done. Maybe.
Maybe it hit an error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you need to re-wind and try again.