So what physical medium will Microsoft be using for their next gen console?

[Infamy79]

WereKitten said:

@Squill
And still: using flash as a transient medium to download from kisosk is sort of a a given, but that's not the same as saying that you buy your games on flash sticks that then lie around unused when you're not playing that specific game. If you use flash as a transport medium only, you use it for transport but have not paid for quantities of silicon lying around unused.
And again I fail to see how flash is in any way more secure than optical disks. It's all in the decrypting and authentication and the only way to control that tightly is by using a central remote server.

Basically I'm saying that if all games are going to play from the console's solid state storage and will be authenticated in a homogeneous way with digital downloaded contet, it doesn't matter what the physical medium actually is. Thus for general retail why shuldn't you go with the cheaper option?

As for your ideas about space needing to be restricted: the optical medium could have space enough, for example, to contain all the different localizations whereas when you download you choose one. Again, much cheaper for the publisher.

So you are proposing a single solid state drive in a console that essentially caches a game from the optical media giving you cheap distribution via current methods, yet the access speed of a cartridge? Is that right?

The biggest problem I see with this is that you will need to install the game every time you play it. That's a massive pain in the ass. There's no way that even in 3 years that you'll be able to have 250-500GB SSD in a console for cheap enough to be mass market price. You'd need that much space to allow you to preinstall multiple games at once.