The online digital music market says hello!

Nah, forget the dl and install method. I want carts back. They are much quicker, no moving parts, more reliable, more durable, and based on flash memory could be 1/4th the physical size of a disc, thus easier to store in mass.

The only drawback is production costs for the memory size required. I truly hope that is resolved prior to the next gen. Give us a 10-20gb flash memory card at a cost of $2-$4 per cart and I'll pay the extra cost in the games price.

Think about it if you could pay $50-$60 for a disc that get scratched, takes up a lot of space relatively speaking, has long pauses between gameplay and startup, increases your systems chances for breaking, etc.

OR

pay $55-$65 for a flash cart type of game that you can toss into a drawer or little plastic box and pretty much never worry about it being defective.

Umm yeah new flash based carts FTW!

You still need to have the disc in the tray for the 360 system, so really theres no point to doing this on the 360 besides marginally (as per XBots regarding the installs for PS3 games) improved install times. Its quicker and easier to just switch discs, 'am I right boys? uh? Uh?

Seriously though, you do need to have the disc in the tray, I personally will never use this feature as that I only have 8 gigs free on my HDD right now, and would rather use that for games and Rock Band DLC than for taking maybe a total of 2 or 3 minutes of total load time over a 40 hour game out.

My preference I guess, as for the PS3, same thing as above, but even worse since most their games are much larger.

It's a pretty ridiculous question. MGS4 alone wouldn't fit on a 40GB PS3...

while you are completely right about the convenience of the flash cart, we won't see them for a long time. A 8GB card cost about 10$ to produce and yet the biggest games on DS are still 128MB. Perhaps Guitar Hero On Tour is bigger. Anyway, my point is that they prefer to use the cheapest medium to save every penny they can save. I have to admit that Xbox360 game on flash memory would rock though.

It would. Despite all the blabbering about Blu-Ray not being enough for MGS4, the game takes up 30GB of data on a Blu-Ray disc.

You could install games, switch discs, or do a combination of both as the installs are optional and not forced on you via the system's inherent weakness.

Yeah cause everyone has T3 lines. Do you know how long it would take me to download a 50gb game?

Weeks.....

Sony has four systems on the market, and no two of them have used the same format. CD's, DVD's, UMD's, and Blu-Ray. Maybe the next Playstation won't use discs. For now, I'd hate having to download, though.

Digital distribution won't catch on until it becomes more convenient than driving to the store.

I doubt it'll happen even then, as I find it way more convenient to do that already, but nobody'll give me the option to DL full length games.