This is the optical drive on the Wii. That wasn't that expensive even at launch.

What if they do resort to it?

Just a thought that crossed my mind, but wouldn't it possibly be beneficial to the BDA to give away the license for free to console manufacturers at this point?

If we are really talking about pennies per system, then considering the average consumer would most likely not buy a BD player at this point anyway, with digital distribution having taken off, it seems like a logical way to increase the market penetration dramatically.

I mean even if out of every 10 console owners, only 1 of them cares enough about having built in Blu-Ray to actually go out and buy a single movie during the entire lifetime of the format it might still be profitable* for the BDA. If this kind of move actually helps the format gain a decent market share, then the whole venture would be wildly profitable!

*I'm assuming that for each movie sold the BDA gets in the area of 10 licenses worth of profit, which going by this thread would equate to a Quarter and change... seems reasonable for a layman like me anyway.

Of course this is all assuming Nintendo even intended to go with Blu-Ray to begin with, not to mention have dual layer support.

It was the most expensive component in the system at launch according to this breakdown. Even if the same component costs $10 today it is still a considerable addition to the cost of hardware, not to mention the effort that would have to go into designing the new console around the inclusion of an otherwise unnecessary physical drive, in terms of size, power requirements and other issues. That's a lot of effort for a secondary feature of a system.

But again, this whole debate seems rather pointless to me since they will be sticking with discs in all likelihood anyway.

Publisher revolt, most likely. N64-style, since then it would end up costing a lot more per unit to physically make the Cafe games (and we know that Nintendo requires more financial input on the publisher's part to make games for their console period than Sony or Microsoft do, so nothing would exist to alleviate those costs)

That "style" can't happen, because flash cards are not the old kind of carts.

1. Most expensive on an inexpensive system doesn't mean much, and that's launch costs.

2. It's not moot just because you think it is. They actually have to do it, not you thinking they would.

LOL

Maybe some clever engineers can build a fan that when rotating produces similar tones to that of an optical drive, and then program it to operate half a phase out of sync with whatever speed the drive is doing at that moment

Free Noise Cancellation FTW!!

Viper1 was discussing a graphical leap, not a raw numbers leap. And Moore's law hit a brick wall years ago, which is why multi-core processors are the major advancements instead of processor speed.