Btw if the Xbox 3 did come with a flashcard slot they could easily update the 360 to also be able to play the same games. I guess you could call it forward/backward compatibility. The games would also probably run a little better on flash as well.

If Turbo Grafix 16 could do it more than a decade ago, why not now? Oh yeah, 3/DS game cards.

Interesting. MS has been talking about going disc free, and I guess they may rather not appear to validate Sony by adopting Blu-ray. I didn't think there would be a return to cartridges for home consoles this soon.

I wonder if there might not be some facility where people can take their 360 discs somewhere and get the game loaded onto a 720 cartridge, for the price of the cartridge.

I really don't see MS going DD only, though I suppose they could go down the Onlive route and DD, so avoiding all hard copy retail sales.

I think there's still a good chance 720 will have a disc tray.

At this point, games would be insanely costly at retailers, SD tech with a bit of content space is expensive as hell. My 60GB system drive costs 200$ alone.

There is a large difference between a SSD system hard drive and a solid state cartridge. The harddrive needs to be optimised for reads AND writes and be able to rewrite many times without fail.  you can buy 64GB USB sticks for under $60 and again those are devices that need to read and write.  Solid state also means you only have to provision as much space on the cartridge as is required for the game. Personally I hope they do go this way, but even with the rapidly falling costs it would still be in the vicinity of a $10+ overhead per game so I have my doubts.

Did anyone else read this and lol? 3 times? Didn't he or someone else at Epic just say next gen needed to be "bleeding edge" to survive? Is it just me or hasn't the established trend been 6 times? Not sure how rumorish this is, but they could eliminate optical in favor of cartridge, if not solid state just to proprietize the medium.  Maybe as a way to prevent piracy, maybe as a cost reduction, or size reduction, or some other thing I'm not thinking of.  I doubt they would go all digital, the technology just isn't available to make it viable, internet connection speeds.  Same reason onlive has a limited market, streaming eats up bandwidth and so does downloading digital media. Pipelines just aren't good enough yet, or atleast not to cater to a large enough market.  I don't think Microsoft cares too much about including blu-ray because Sony was a top investor in it.  They haven't rejected working with Sony stuff before and vise versa, just like Apple hasn't (no matter how many fans think these companies want to kill eachother, for example iPhone 4s uses a Sony chip, its the same with Microsoft, options are open).  It would make sense to go Blu-ray if they go optical.

Well would make it easier for them to stop "used" sales.

I mean just imagine how easy it would be...

Sell a console > New Xbox and Playstation with 300GB Cards.
These cards are registered with the console and account.If you get a new one cause of space issues you have do this too.
Games are downloaded of course from the shops or you go into a local store(they get high ultra speed internet connections where it only takes like 1 minute to download 50GB like in Sweden for example).
Those things will be registered to your console and account too...

BÄM Used sales stoped.
Gaming is dying cause of that?Not really - There are enough people and the addiction to that hobby is stronger than the hate for that.

they can just not have the disk drive built in and install the games you buy as disks... next box

Do not see why MS could not just either sell SD card or give out an approved list.  You buy one big SD card, go to Gamestop purchase your game, they put it on the disk.  Then you can either install the game to a Solid State HDD in your Xbox or leave it on the SD card.  Also with Apple showing how having a App Store is the way to go, you will be able to just purchase the game online and download it to your drive or your SD card.

For people who want backward compat, you can purchase a cheap external drive from MS (yes I know they do not do cheap) and then be able to play those games.  Also this will give you the ability to install the games on yoru HDD or SD if you want.

MS can definitely cut the Disk Drive and the savings can go to a decent size SS HDD.  They already have all this streaming going on so having a physical drive isn't neccessary especially since App stores are changing the way people think about how they get their software.