Not until prices are lower on cartridges.

2 generations should be enough, at the rate technology progresses.

its easier and cheaper to just put an SSD in there.

In 2019/20 (around when the next consoles are due to come out), a 1TB SSD will cost aroung or less than what a 500GB HDD cost today... at least using OEM prices. So theres that. But its not even enough, cause even at that we are still looking at a SATA3 real world transfer speed that peaks at 500MB/s. That will speed up load times by at least 3 times compared to what we have today but then again, the data being moved could be more so we are stll stuck here.

A dream fix that is possible would be something like this. Every console will come with two drives, one tethered to ur SATA 3 interface like they are today SSD/HDD (though what we use is sata2 now) and would be called the storage drive. Then another drive soldered directly onto the board of like 256GB or 128GB called the active drive (AD). Now the active drive being directly on the board can have transfer speeds of as high as 2/3GB/s (for reference a PCIE 3.0 SSD can hit transfer speeds of up t 1GB/s today). So, basically what happens is that you download a game and it goes to your SSD/HDD then when you load the game to play it copies itself to your AD. Now as long as you don't play say more than 2/3 games simultaneously then the game remains on your AD taking advantage of the 3GB/s transfer speeds. If you load a 4th game, the least played game on the Ad gets deleted and replaced. I could actually see them doing this next gen.

Solid state cartidges? Never! Solid state drives? Yes! Most definitely! Digital distribution is the future!

Pfft, not if I can help it. We're not ready for a full digital market from a legal standpoint. Technology advances at a breakneck pace that will only get faster. Politics advances like molasses in winter. I could see technology advancing enough that a cheap solid state cartridge could be manufactured in a couple of generations, maybe by the 10th or 11th. The legal consumer rights needed to have a viable full digital market are still being fought over viciously. I suspect the battle will wage until most of the people born before the internet are DEAD. So, you know, a HUMAN generation away. If we were going full digital within the next generation or so, Microsoft wouldn't have had to do a 180 with the XBO.

Well said.  :)

If the price per bit get hugely lower,yes but this is not going to happen.

Negatory. First of all cartridges wouldn't be carts like the old days they'd be more akin to SD cards therefore they would be even harder to keep track of than discs which negates your assertion to the contrary.

Second, as has been stated elsewhere here they are too expensive compared to discs by quite a lot. And lastly, we are beginning to move away from physical media (much to my own dismay) and ANY way a content producer can cut over head they will push for it and fewer people are buying physical media so add that up and you can forget about even consuming disc based let alone cartridge based games.

Sorry bud, carts are dead. They aren't making a comeback.

They came back on the Vita! :P

Despite the price issues, keep in mind that it won't remove loading times. You still have to read from the drive and copy to RAM. Cartridges were directly connected to a fast bus and the console mapped the cartridge to a memory address, so address 0 to X (total RAM) was your memory and address X until Y (size of the cartridge plus RAM) were your memory mapping and it's just a matter of directly calling it. You could even stream data right from the cartridge and economize RAM memory.

It's wiser to put a single SSD to a console, use a regular optical disk and simply cache the disk on the SSD. Cost effective and same result.