Erik rants. Today: "The PS3 is not the N64!"

[HappySqurriel]

Kwaad said: I want to call you on this really quick. Samsung has a 64gb CF card in prototype. However the cheapest you will find anything over 8gb, is about 200$ (infact most 8gb are around 100$) Follow the 'triple' price for data plan. 8gb = 50 16gb = 150 32gb = 450 64gb = 1350 price halves every year. I will go with the 64gb because that is the 'first' to surpass BluRay. 2008 - 675 2009 - 336 2010 - 168 2011 - 84 (getting there) 2012 - 42 (still not quite cheap enough to put on a 50$ game) 2013 - 21 (almost there) 2014 - 11.50 (finally within reason. I think we already have 'prototype' flash memory that rivals BluRay. We do have 200gb prototype BluRay media tho. Basically it will be over a year before we see 64gb flash media. And it will be well over 5 years before we see it cheap enough for mainstream. I have a high intrest in Flash Media. I have a *need* and I mean a professional need for it. Let's just say I have a 2gb Card, and it lasts me about 30 minutes. (I need at least 4 hours) I assure you. We wont be seeing mainstream Flash media passing BluRay in the near future. As TDK is gonna be launching a new line of BluRay burners in a year or two, and along with those burners, they will launch the new 200gb BD-R. And then that will put a chokehold on mass media storage.

Well you're assuming that you would have 1 flash memory chip inside of your "memory cartridge" format and that means that you have the most expensive chip at any given time... Consider that you can (currently) get cheap 2GB flash cards for about $20 so a 32 GB "cartridge" would cost at most $320 currently; it is likely that you would see cost savings from manufacturing a multi-chip solution and (in bulk) a company could probably get a massive discount ... As a rough guestimate I would expect it would cost Nintendo $120-$160 to make one of these cartridges Using your "half per year" estimate 2007 $120-$160 2008 $60-$80 2009 $30-$40 2010 $15-$20 2011 $8-$10 Now, certainly it would be likely that you wouldn't publish all of your games on a cartridge this size (you'd probably have 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB cartridges) but it is a massive ammount of data ... Anyways My point was that in the N64 days you would have a 1MB cartridge vs. a 600MB CD ... In 5 years you will (likely) have a 8GB or 16GB cartridge vs a 25GB-50GB optical format ... Regardless on what you may think, many (if not most) developers would probably choose the flash format as compared to the optical format