Flash != mask rom.

And the whole point of Flash production is monetizing free space.  The space and capacity itself is the commodity being sold and monetized.  Flash is expensive because empty space is what they are selling you for maximum markup.

With software distribution, you have the opposite goal.  You are selling software for profit and the cost of the distribution media is an operating cost that is eating into your profit and needs to be minimal and maginalized to almost nothing.  You arent going to throw $30 on top of the $60 game price JUST because it's "64 GB" stamped on the card and no other reason.

Capcom and Konami killed themselves.  You can't blame Sony for that.  Where was Megaman or Breath of Fire oer Contra on PS3 or 360 or Wii?  7th Gen lasted over 8 years.  Where the hell did Breath of Fire or Zombies ate my Neighbors go?  Sony didn't tell Capcom to lust after Call of Duty dollars and completely destroy Resident Evil trying to get into the wallets of the ADHD mouth breather casuals. These companies hurt themselves by forgetting their own niche roots, disrespecting the fan base that made them what they are, and attempting to chase after their piece of the Call of Duty and Angry Birds pies.

They screwed themselves by ditching their best friends to try to fit in with the new kids on the block when gaming went mainstream*  and now they are trying to crawl back and say they are sorry years later. Mainstream = the point when gaming became "cool" and not a "kids toy" and everyone had to have a polished and waxed Xbox or Playstation on their living room table.

 I lost all hope in Konami when they said mobile phones are the future of gaming a few days ago.

Square would also be dead by now as well if not for FF XIV ARR being the biggest comeback in gaming history.  Where was Secret of Mana on PS3 or Wii? That wasn't Nintendo or Sony's fault.

I doubt that, Nintendo knows that his next console have to be more than just a "game" machine, they have to make it multimidia friendly to have a place in all people rooms. The days of gaming only machines are on the past.

I see your point, but i still think they would be incurring in a big risk. I guess if you make a powerful HH and maybe stop some assets from loading during a HH session could make it work.

You think they are going to sell the devices separately right? Could NX be a HH launched alone first (maybe even able to play Wii U games, if bought digitally) and the complementary console later?

No way.  Show me a BD that can stream 90 MB/s (not bits, BYTES) or can sustain MB/sec speeds under purely random access.  Once you start seeking random small files the SD card is going to be thousands of times faster.

Yes, like pretty much every prediction I ever see on here.

When I go against my better judgement and click on them to read what the person thinks, I usually end up rolling my eyes.

I can see it happening if they go for a unified design. It would have to be a memory card type that fits on both. Preferably similar to 3DS and DS cards so that both consoles can be backwards compatible. WiiU gamepads would be paired with the home console (and sold seperately) to enable DS and 3DS game compatibility. IMO, the disc drive would be a must. Having backwards compatibility with WiiU and Wii software will require it (can't just rely on digital format), though no new games will be made in disc format. But all this implies perhaps a complicated hardware design since it would need the DS, 3DS, Wii and WiiU processors on board for hardware emulation on top of the new chip.

Back OT, one potential issue would be the storage size of the memory card cartridges. Too much and too fast would be expensive to make. We might underestimate the capacity needed to have games run at native 1080p or higher resolution. And read speed since the data would be very large.

I wasn't advocating mechanical media, more as no more physical media.   They way songs, music, business, and many movies, games and TV shows are now distributed.  Actually, just exactely like this web site, and all other web sites.  They are just digital data in the internet ether.

I think we are about to have another bump forward in computer power.  The last few development cycles have been about making things smaller and use less power - more so than more power and higher speed.  But DDR4 memory is out and the chips have caught up with battery and cooling life - time to expand forward as they did around a decade ago.

4k is here, but I have only seen it as an all digital media.  From Youtube to Netflix, there is 4k content as well as the soon more broadly adoptin of .256 format which will give you a 4k picture in the same badwith as 1080p today.  Plus the internet is just getting so much faster.

They could do SD cards.  And there are a few good reasons for them, but with all the extra processing, packaging and shipping I think they are lost to the benefits of, cost savings, endless duplication and rapid distrubtion of an all digital format.

Thats why SD card is a good thing, because every smart device have SD or MicroSD slot.

-People are forgetting that prices of SD, Micro SD cards, SSD, USB Flash...are constantly falling like a rock.

-They can have a range of sizes of SD cards.
Majority of Nintendo Wii U games are less than 8GB, it safe to say that majority of games on next hardware will be less than 20GB, so 32GB SD would be more than enuf for Nintendo games, but they can use 16GB and evan 8GB for some games, and for really big games like a Xenoblade X or some 3rd party it can be used 64GB.

-What's with all this, "what about patches and DLCs", what about them!?
You can clearly see how are they managed now on current gen, I don't see why would be different on next Nintendo console.

SD slot is very cheap, much cheaper than optical drive, that could affect on price of console.
Also maybe Nintendo could have little cheaper digital games on eShop than physical SD based games.