| The Anarchyz said: Don't make mistakes, all of them will go optical for their consoles, obviously flash media for the handhelds, and here's why: You are only talking about MS, Ninty and Sony, but you don't count something into the equation: 3rd PARTY PUBLISHERS... Remember that 3rd party is key to all of them, and 3rd party is not going to abandon the really cheap media for going flash in consoles... For that to happen the difference in cost has to be small enough to go that route, and right now, while optical cost less than $1 to manufacture (as opposed to 32 GB flash that cost $50 in retail, now figure how much is the production cost), it's not convenient for 3rd parties, unless Microsoft is willing to pay a lot of money to them for compensate costs (and we know Ninty won't take that route)... I still remember when Square got in a fight with Yamauchi because of many things but the hardest one was because the 64 MB cartridge, while optical costed a lot less and brought 700 MB per disc... Ninty won't make the same mistake again, they're already slowly recovering 3rd party support... |
You don't count something in your figuring of the costs of optical media. Every disk produced costs publishers ~$7 if you count royalties, ~$10 if you count transportation and packaging along with retail space.
If a console manufacturer can release and sell hardware for a profit then they won't need to rely on as much in the way of royalties per disk and can easily subsidise the cost of a basic level of flash media, say 8 or 16gb and let publishers pay additional royalties if they wish to use higher capacity media. At least until the cost of flash starts to scale down to rock bottom levels.
See flash based retail packaging would cost less than half as much to transport, retailers would love it as they could fit more than twice as many games into the same space, and therefore the number of retailers willing to carry games would increase and unsold flash drives can be recycled and therefore recoop much of the production cost if a game bombs.
If you look at the hardware itself, optical drives make sense really only when you're looking at two current generation consoles duct taped together. Even then, Nintendo has shown that lowering hardware costs is one of the keys to success in the console business and im sure even if they want to follow on with another massive increase in performance that cutting the hardware costs to reasonable levels is a key factor in any possible success.
Lastly flash opens up some very real interesting future possibilities such as being able to rent games to completion instead of giving those pricks at gamestop a cent of your money. Also with downloads becoming more important, it will surely mitigate much of the cost of using flash media by balancing between the more expensive flash and the relatively cheaper online downloads (From a publishers perspective)
Tease.
