Kyros said: Hehe so you want to go back to smaller discs again? Fat chance this will happen. The point is that many problems of discs can be fixed with hard-disc cache. Games like Uncharted, Ratchet, ... show that this is possible without long loadtimes, without big install... Flash may be the future for handhelds but definitely not for full games. Download to big hard-disc is more like it.

Between mandatory installs and up to a minute loading before you can even enter any control inputs to start/load a game, there are always loading screens. Also Hard drives are expensive and their cost doesn't scale with time. So that Juicy $400 console may never drop below $150/200 because both the optical drives/hard drives which will both be mandatory just don't scale down in cost like semi-conductors. Furthermore installs are annoying.

@The Fury:

The cheapest 30gb drive is currenty $70 on New Egg with 150 megabytes/sec read speed. It comes with a Sata interface and full retail/manufacturer markups and most likey a premium from it being a new technology. Those costs could easily scale down to under $5 for a humble 16gb card within a few years with mass production of the technology. For comparisons sake the cheapest SD cards are now $6.75 for a 4gb SD card, and $13 for an 8gb card and $24 for a 16gb card. But give it a couple of die shrinks and your 16gb card should cost less than that 4gb card.

 

I'd like to see how well a flash hard drive runs, but there's no way I'd be getting one till they offer a lot more space for the price, which is going to take time.

I thought this was the future?

Ooops, wrong decade! o.O

That's still not very optimistic if we're talking about a cost multiplied by the number of copies of a game...

SHMUPGurus said: I thought this was the future? Ooops, wrong decade! o.O

 

And what about this one

The Anarchyz said: SHMUPGurus said: I thought this was the future? Ooops, wrong decade! o.O And what about this one

Hey there! Don't laugh about the first "USB keys!" D:

What? It had removable drives. ^^

There is no mandatory install in 360 games and none in many exclusive PS3 games like Uncharted. Loadtimes are likewise very small in them. The problem seems to be more that games are ported from the 360 and the easy way out is to add a huge install, saving some development time. Hardly a BluRay problem per se. (Oh and MGS4 also sucked at this).



Harddisc space will at least in the next decade be much much cheaper than flash memory. So I don't understand your solution to this "problem". You'd rather have a console that is 20 Euro cheaper (you will need some storage in the console for firmware, downloads ...) but then pay 5-10$ more on each game? Sounds a bit weird to me.

The Anarchyz said: SHMUPGurus said: I thought this was the future? Ooops, wrong decade! o.O   And what about this one

 

Guys, please, THIS is the future...

Or it was, pre-1980 or so.

@The Fury: £10 for a flash card? What's the average price of a flash USB stick? 4GB flash USB drives are about the equivalent of £4 each here and falling.

@Above me - I'm going off dabs.com their cheapest 4GB Flash USB drive is £5.02. This is still not as cheap as a single DVD though. Their cheapest DVDs of 4.7GB each is £2.55 for 10. So £5.02 vs £0.25. Flash USB drives might be falling but like all things, price of DVDs will also fall.

Holographic media is the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

Nintendo knows!