UncleScrooge said: What a crap rumor Imagine how much a game shipped on a 32GB flash card would cost. I don't even want to think about a 64GB one... Nintendo 64 cartridges would look cheap in comparison.

Humm... I remember the good old cartridge time... and in my country they were about ~72 € (1000 Schilling) (against 59 - 65 what most new games of today cost), tough the expensive ones could hit the ~100 € mark... (about 1399 Schilling) though usually they were cheaper than that, and would reach a cheaper price point much faster than games nowadays do

It helps a previous rumor that said there would be one lower end console that didnt have a disk drive, meant purely for online purposes.

Then there was a disk drive high end console meant for core gamers.

Stefl1504 said: UncleScrooge said: What a crap rumor Imagine how much a game shipped on a 32GB flash card would cost. I don't even want to think about a 64GB one... Nintendo 64 cartridges would look cheap in comparison. Humm... I remember the good old cartridge time... and in my country they were about ~72 € (1000 Schilling) (against 59 - 65 what most new games of today cost), tough the expensive ones could hit the ~100 € mark... (about 1399 Schilling) though usually they were cheaper than that, and would reach a cheaper price point much faster than games nowadays do

My biggest concern is that once you hit a certain size prices just go up exponentially. And a lot of games would come on 64GB cards next gen. Even if we assume there's a 50% markup for consumers (current consumer prices are roughly one Euro / Dollar per GB, aren't they?) that would still put production costs at $30 per 64GB card. And I think games will get more expensive next generation due to higher development costs. In that case prices of $100 per flash card game wouldn't be out of the question. Also producing masses of 64GB cards wouldn't be easy. It would probably put Microsoft in the position Nintendo was in with the N64 cards: They'd have the monopoly on the cards and most publishers would have to buy the cards straight from Microsoft. 

On N64 game prices: They were definitely more expensive than Playstation games in most countries. As long as the games were small prices were fine. Mario Kart 64 came on a 16MB card so the price was rather cheap  but games on 32MB card were roughly 70 Euro already and games like Conker that came on a 64MB card cost the equivalent of 80 Euro (or more...? I can't remember haha ). Of course today's prices would be higher due to inflation and bigger development costs. I also remember the player's choice games to be more pricey than their Plastation counterparts.

Personally I was a huge fan of the cartridges though They are way more durable than CD's and the loading times on Playstation games were atrocious at times.

I refuse to believe this is true.

Heh, it´s always the same, a few months before a console in unveiled (assuming the next Xbox will be at E3, which I think it will be) and we get plenty of rumors, most of them always turn out to be crap.

What people are failing to realize is that MS is pushing for Clouds for storage. It would make sense they want to do this so customers start getting used to using clouds over actual physical storage. But MS is not dumb, they know we're still some years away from full Cloud adaptation so going the flash drive makes sense. We'll see what happens tho!

If this happens, Sony's back in the top spot. You know, unless they follow suit...

Interesting, but unlikely. Remember when the WiiU was rumoured to have loads of things that it didn't (eg. that weird touchscreen that touches you back?)

Wow how can people not be looking forward to this? Its great news.

Its time we finally moved away from optical drives just like we did from VHS. No more scratched DVDs, no more broken 360s. Yea optical disks may be cheaper now, but SD cards are pretty cheap as well and will get cheaper as we go along. Using USB 3.0 with this combined with a bigger push for cloud storage could very well define next generation. After next gen, things would finally be ready for us to make the jump to cloud gaming altogether hopefully.

I commend MS if they actually decide to lead the charge on this.

Just a thought as I'm trying to make sense of this but what if they used the Redbox model? Redbox for those of you who don't know are basically just vending machines all over the US, where you can rent a movie. This along with Netflix basically killed the retail giant Blockbuster Video.

So lets say your 7-11/Best Buy has a "XBox 720" vending machine. Take your HDD or USB 3.0 thumb drive to the vending machine. Browse the on-screen menu, select which game you want, swipe your credit card or pre-paid XBox "points" card and voila, it's transferred to your drive in a few minutes.

By cutting out physical production of games + retail mark up + shipping costs, they could undercut physical games by $10 a copy perhaps. And this would effectively kill used game sales, something 3rd parties would be happy about.

And for people who want to just digital download, they can do that as well. But this would be a workaround for people who have ISP caps or don't have fast enough internet. I'm not saying I like this ... but I could see it happening. 

Card storage is coming.

The cheapest 8GB SD-cards are already down at $5 at the consumer end. By the time the X720 comes out in November 2013 the cheapest 16 GB SD-cards will probably cost less than $4 at the consumer end while MS and game distributors could probably get them for only $2-3.

Early on in the generation 16GB will be enough for most games and one or two years into the generation developers are ready to make larger games but by then 32GB cards will be dirty cheap.