1. I want my backwards compatibility!!!! (and my PS3 does have bc)
2. Uncharted showed how you can make a game with a 30 second load time, and then nothing else at all, and the disc drive does not get very loud, it is only because the Xbox is not made very well that it sounds like a jet fighter (thank god for installs!) and of course I do still love owning my games

This !

To add to it, i like my blu ray shiny discs and don't want cartriges or other types of formats. I can deal with regular dlc but not as the only option.. furthermore... flash can be unreliable :P

Oh yeah and my ps3 has never sounded like a chainsaw XD

I won't tollerate anything that undermines Blu-Ray

*dimsmisses thread and runs away speedily*

So, from that link on flash drive read speeds, "80GB and 160GB flavors and will cost about $2,649 and $4,899". So if we assume games next gen will be bigger than the 360's current games, say 15-20 gigs, which i think is low, but we'll go with that. A game might cost $660, sweet! I love games that are more expensive than the console.

Frugality. You're welcome.

The rate at which they increase flash capacity while reducing costs is indeed impressive, and it's not hard to imagine it as a viable storage medium for home consoles.

I'm very curious to see what Nintendo comes up with for holographic storage. Could a massive WORM drive and an internet connection replace optical discs and physical retailing?

I've always liked this idea very much. Thank you for going so far as to communicate it, Squilliam.

I don't know if it is particularly viable in the next five years, but if it were I would be delighted with it.

1. Theres always the HD-DVD type external drive if you want it. ^^

2. Theres still that delay in actually starting the game, and you will hear an 8-12* Blu Ray drive so it will be a source of noise if they scale the speeds up for the next generation. Furthermore to use an optical drive a console needs - > Optical Drive, Hard Drive for installs, and extra ram just like on a computer because data from the HDD/Optical drive cannot be streamed fast enough. Thats between $50-$100 of extra hardware for no real benifit to you, just to cover up the weaknesses of a format.

So you're saying that If I had a solid state drive on my computer, I wouldn't need any ram??!??!?  Then why are CPU manufacturers still making processors that need ram, don't they know that they don't need it? Seems like a bad investment to me if what you say is true.

A 25 Gig flashcard costs close to $100.00. Optical disks cost only a fraction of that.

Lulz, I said it would need extra ram. And yes, if you have an uberfast SSD on your computer and the operating system was optimised to use it, you wouldn't need as much ram.

Seriously its the optical drives and hard drives which will turn consoles into mini-computers. If they suffer the same drawbacks then they will have to use the same solutions to those problems. Consoles should be designed as pure gaming machines, not something which could pass off as Uncle Joe's desktop if you got Linux installed onto it. Consoles are about making the hardware design decisions that computers cannot have due to conflicting standards and inertia.