As much as I would love for cartridges to be reborn, I think it makes far more sense to have a caching disc in a game console ...

I can't believe some people actually think an SSD in a home console would be a good idea. What sizes do you have in mind exactly? If they add a 250GB SSD to a console the price will go up $200. Even if the console is not a single bit more powerful than an Xbox360 you'd have to pay $400 if there was a 256GB SSD in there...

As for game cards... I've said this in another thread: even 32GB cards would be very expensive compared to discs and we will need 32GB of storage next generation. That would mean game prices of $79 or even higher for games on 64GB cards. And it would still hurt publisher profitability (and thus 3rd party support) a lot.

Although SSD technology is top of the line and would be great for gaming, it just isn't going to happen anytime soon. Its waaaaaay too expensive atm.

A 100GB SSD costs around £100 if you manage to get yourself a good deal. MS could get that maybe for say half price, so £50 for a 100GB drive for a console. Now take into consideration every game would have to come in a SSD cart and games this gen are on average about 10GB each in size with higher end graphical games like Uncharted take almost full bluray discs with are 50GB. Next gen 50GB will probably become a baseline for the amount of space games need due to improved graphics, physics, etc, with high end games taking even more space. Now for each game, MS would have to pay £25 just for the drive it comes in, now that is ridiculous how you look at it. If you are talking downloadable games, your 100GB drive would only hold approximately 2 games. You would need a 1TB solid state drive next gen for the downloadable option, and I wouldn't want to think how much a 1TB SSD hard drive costs.

So its more likely they will go for SD card technology, as they are a step up from bluray and pretty cheap commercially.

i really don't expect to pay the same for my games in the future as i did 1995. so $79 would really not shock me (damn isn't that cheap thinking about what i had to pay for n64 games most of the time?)

and there was a guy few posts eralier talking about ssd without writing possibilities which would make it much cheaper but i donÄt know anything about this.

As long as it doesnt cut down on load time

I would ABSOLUTELY be behind the usage of flash memory for the NextBox IF they release an affordable DVD-drive add-on for 360 backwards compatibility.

If not, I'd probably still get it, but be rather irritated at them.

Hmm, a fast BD drive (Or something custom) + fast regular HDD (Like 1 TB) and the ability to download all new games from XBL as well would be more cost efficient and certainly good enough to keep me happy.

Although I wouldn't say no to a possible 320GB SSD in my Next-Box.

If(f) they make a guarantee that all releases were going to be available as download, they could release an SKU without optical media. Personally, I wouldn't buy it, because I'm a cheap skate, and I like buying old used games for a couple quid.

I picked up 5 games with my Xbox when I bought it, for £20. Some of those games cost £20 on their own on the marketplace.

As for some kind of SSD/cartridge based media, I think it's a fantastic idea. While they may be a bit costy now, mid-generation they could certainly start paying off. Thing is... Microsoft may be happy to take that hit, but will third-party publishers?

They could call it the Xbox:Go...

So....the industry could have saved itself a lot of trouble these last 16 years and just stuck with cartridges, constantly improving on storage size without sacrificing sound quality?

CD/DVD/Blu-ray drives in game consoles were never actually necessary?

Remind me next time someone says to not take Nintendo's advice on methods of game storage, and I will take the opportunity to ignore the naysayers and for the first time in my life TAKE NINTENDO'S SIDE.