Optical drives need to be kicked to the curb! Flash is the next-gen future.

[Squilliam]

NJ5 said:

$5 is my estimate for retail flash like SD cards. You wouldn't base your estimates on the viability of Blu Ray based on writeable media you can buy online would you? But in reality Blu Ray or DVD costs a publisher about $7 per disk if you include royalties.

We have to make equal comparisons. What are those royalties you're talking about? You mean console licensing royalties? The disc royalties themselves shouldn't cost anywhere near that.

You're right about retail/wholesale prices, I was just going from your numbers since I haven't seen better data.

Essentially I believe that consoles need to use a more "console-like" architecture in the future to be competitive and deliver the performance people need. By using slower media like Blu Ray it requires a console to essentially have a similar architecture as a standard personal computer because the challenges are the same. You have a slow data delivery so the information must be cached on much larger stores of ram.

The 360 and the Wii are doing fine without using HDD for caching. Only the PS3 has problems with mandatory installs. I don't see a reason to believe these problems will be present with 4x/8x Blu-Ray drives transferring data at 18-36 MB/s.

 

The issue I have with using a HDD is simplicity and cost. Fast flash based media will simplicity to consoles and Nintendo especially seem very interested in going down that route. Nintendo doesn't care about movie playback, and this generation has shown it isn't a significant issue and it will be even less of an issue next generation. With a 4x or 8x Blu Ray and 4x the memory, could they get away with using an optical drive as easily? With patches etc becoming more important, having a SSD could alleviate the issue entirely.