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The Anarchyz on 16 December 2008
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Squilliam said:
NJ5 said:
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.


Now I'm confused. Are we talking about the game media or the media inside the console? I thought this thread was about the former. I have nothing against Nintendo's approach of using SSD for internal memory instead of HDD.

My basic reasoning is this:

Reduce the cost of the base model substantially, targeting a $150-$250 cost bracket initially with the ability to reduce the cost quickly to a low baseline. As a pure gaming machine, I believe it is far cheaper if they can make the console simpler with less reliance on mechanical parts. So take the Arcade SKU and use that model as a baseline to build up the larger SKUs as well.

Moving towards an online distribution model, it makes even less sense to include an optical drive in the consoles. However with flash based media they can retain the ability to distribute games through retail far cheaper and they don't have the dead weight of a drive they intend to discard for the most part anyway.

If you need to apply patches to a game, you need some form of storage. But with flash based media, you could patch the media itself rather than needing to store the information on the hard disk. That increases the viability of a basic Arcade - like SKU. With a few hundred megabytes of space available it will let them play online games, maybe even games like MMOs which previously required hard-drives.

So yes, the thread is about the media. The media is a means to reduce the consoles from to purely solid state devices, not relying on mechanical parts which are prone to breaking down eventually.

And i'm all for that, i love flash drives and Memory Cards, i don't use the UMD slot on my PSP because i dump the UMD data on my Memory Card to have a real handheld gaming experience, my computer has a SSD for both OSs, while the virtual memory/swap file and apps/data are handled in HDDs (SSDs still have a rewrite limitation)... I picked my latest DVD player with a USB drive (That was before the PS3 so i don't use it as often now), i was one of the first ones in my circle to have a flash MP3 player (everyone had either CD players or Classic iPods that have HDDs), etc.

I get your point, i even imagine how the SKUs can be distributed:

SKU 1 - Media: Flash Drive for Games, Internal Memory: 4 GB. 1 Multi Card Reader and USB slots

SKU 2 - Media: Flash Drive for Games/Optical for Movies, Internal Memory: 8 GB. 1 Multi Card Reader and USB slots

SKU 3 - Media: Flash Drive for Games/Optical for Other stuff (Movies, OS Apps, anything but games), SSD: 150 GB. 1 Multi Card Reader and USB slots

SKU 4 and up have simply more SSD space

The problem is, i don't see any of the 3 companies changing to that now or the next gen, mainly because 3rd party support, but the option is really viable for the gen after that...