WereKitten said: Squilliam said: I like the idea of Flash, something like 200MB/Sec download speed and no moving parts like HDDs/Optical drives to break/pay for! That's all nice of course, but we'll have to see how much half a Terabyte of flash memory will cost in the same timeframe. It could just be too expensive as a read-only support.

Why would you need that much? Most games don't go above 10GB's now, and the capacity/price would increase/decrease very steadily as the generation progressed.

Squilliam said: WereKitten said: Squilliam said: I like the idea of Flash, something like 200MB/Sec download speed and no moving parts like HDDs/Optical drives to break/pay for! That's all nice of course, but we'll have to see how much half a Terabyte of flash memory will cost in the same timeframe. It could just be too expensive as a read-only support. Why would you need that much? Most games don't go above 10GB's now, and the capacity/price would increase/decrease very steadily as the generation progressed.

I assumed that the most commercially viable storage medium should at the very least be shared between gaming and movie industry. That requires today space in the range of 30-50GB, but it will easily get to 200-400GB when mass market catches up with the prosumer 2k-4k resolution that will be common in 5 years.

WereKitten said: Squilliam said: WereKitten said: Squilliam said: I like the idea of Flash, something like 200MB/Sec download speed and no moving parts like HDDs/Optical drives to break/pay for! That's all nice of course, but we'll have to see how much half a Terabyte of flash memory will cost in the same timeframe. It could just be too expensive as a read-only support. Why would you need that much? Most games don't go above 10GB's now, and the capacity/price would increase/decrease very steadily as the generation progressed.     I assumed that the most commercially viable storage medium should at the very least be shared between gaming and movie industry. That requires today space in the range of 30-50GB, but it will easily get to 200-400GB when mass market catches up with the prosumer 2k-4k resolution that will be common in 5 years.

But why and how would games need that much space in the next generation, while staying within the same or lower budgets than this gen's games?

^They won't, I said that I expect consoles to trail 2-3 years behind the needs of the movie industry. I just assumed a common storage medium for commercial reasons.
Basically a 150-300GB BluRay (with 4x or 8x speed) will be the safest bet for mass market. Meanwhile Holographic/BR combos might become common among prosumer video content creators.

I could see some marketing potential in selling MGS1-5 on one dic (assuming PS4 has full b/c), or Halo 1-6 + bonus Halo Wars 1-3 + the making of Halo doco, and the cgi movie which bombed at the box office, and the animated series 1-3 from the Cartoon Network...

Rinse and repeat for all the other great game franchises. Bring all the greats of the past to a new generation while still providing a shiny new game. All on one disc.

Of course if you have a 500Gig BR disc you can just about do this without the new tech.

TBH if ps3 had HDDVD built in Blu ray would of lost.

Simple really

My bet for 2012 topics:

"Why the hell does Sony include this nonsense. I want gaming machine not movie player"

"They should have went with cheap and fast blue-ray storage"

I doubt that SONY will NOT us BD.

BD will be the main storage media in the PS4. Mark my words!

Yeah, after the financial disaster of the PS3 it's hard to see them pushing cutting-edge tech again... unless someone convinces me this new technology will be affordable by then, my bet is that the PS4 (and perhaps other consoles too) will use BD.

WereKitten, I highly doubt 4k or even 2k will be common within 5 years in the household. 1080p tvs are just now starting to become somewhat common in households and they have been on the market for several years.