GPUs for the new consoles. Starting in the late 2010s, the power of these GPU cards were being used by cryptocurrency "miners", as they were comparatively lower cost than other computing hardware for the same purposes, and created a run on GPU cards that inflated prices and card shortages over extended periods. Solid state drives (SSDs), which had been used for flash card storage for video game consoles in the past, had advanced far enough to become consumer options for large volume storage. Compared to the traditional hard disk drive (HDD) which used electromechanical parts, SSD drives have no mechanical componentry and are capable of much higher data throughput, which made them popular options for computers designed for video games. Further advancements in online gaming: Cross-platform play and cloud gaming Until the 2010s, online play for most platforms were limited to players on that same platform, though some games such as Final Fantasy XI had experimented with limited models. As new gaming consoles converged in design to personal computers and with common middleware libraries, it became technically feasible to allow for cross-platform play between different platforms, but business objectives by Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, looking to maintain control on their online services, initially rejected this, most notably by Sony who had stated they wanted to maintain a family-friendly environment for its online services. Epic Games' Fortnite Battle Royale first released in 2017 proved an instrumental driver on cross-platform play. Fortnite had quickly gained popularity in its first few months of release, and Epic had been able to prove the ease which cross-platform play could be implemented between the Xbox, Windows, and mobile platforms with its backend libraries. Nintendo followed by allowing cross-play on the Switch, and eventually, by 2018 Sony agreed to allow selected games such as Fortnite to have cross-platform play. Since then, numerous games have gained or were released with cross-platform play support across consoles, computers, and mobile devices. The first cloud gaming services emerged in 2009. These services allowed players to play games where the processing power was performed on a computer system at a hosted location, while the game's output and player's input were sent to that system over the Internet, using the power of cloud computing. This eliminated the need for a costly console or dedicated gaming computer for players. Early services like OnLive and Gaikai showed that cloud gaming was possible but was very