@The Anarchyz
Flash based media doesn't have to be as cheap as optical disks to be effective. Because the Xbox 360 can only store 6.8GB of data per disk they could easily get away with 8gb sized flash drives for media. There are other compelling reasons for going with flash, significant compelling reasons. A lot of games at the start of the next generation will be simple ports of the current generation and 6.8GBs is the standard which Microsoft has disctated to the industry through their success.
Take the Xbox 360, it comes without a HDD. Effective strategy? Yes its currenty able to be sold for $200 because it doesn't have the fixed cost of the HDD constantly pushing the price up. Take that mindset one further and having an SKU without HDD or Optical drive with a minimum of flash for saved games starts to make perfect sense.
As for the price of the media, they could easily charge $5 more next generation for games, $4/1 split between the console manufacturer and retailer to pay for the extra cost of the media if they have to. To be quite frank really, the console manufacturing costs are far too high at the moment to be tenable. So much money is spent on hardware just to make up for the failings of the optical media.
Tease.
