Well, the transition *might* be easy for Nintendo and Microsoft if they take this route. But not for Sony because of BR.

Imagine a PS4 with a BR for PS3 BC, but no PS4 games will ever use the BR drive (because if it did, then they have to support BR again for PS5, if ever).

I'm sure both M$ and Ninty will have optical media...since people will still have their dvds, anf for BC, because I don't forsee M$ killing 360 like they did for the last console...this console was built with efficiencies in mind, unlike the last one.

Agreed. Sony is in something of a pickle... unless they abandon backwards compatibility, which is very possible.

Don't make mistakes, all of them will go optical for their consoles, obviously flash media for the handhelds, and here's why:

You are only talking about MS, Ninty and Sony, but you don't count something into the equation: 3rd PARTY PUBLISHERS...

Remember that 3rd party is key to all of them, and 3rd party is not going to abandon the really cheap media for going flash in consoles... For that to happen the difference in cost has to be small enough to go that route, and right now, while optical cost less than $1 to manufacture (as opposed to 32 GB flash that cost $50 in retail, now figure how much is the production cost), it's not convenient for 3rd parties, unless Microsoft is willing to pay a lot of money to them for compensate costs (and we know Ninty won't take that route)...

I still remember when Square got in a fight with Yamauchi because of many things but the hardest one was because the 64 MB cartridge, while optical costed a lot less and brought 700 MB per disc... Ninty won't make the same mistake again, they're already slowly recovering 3rd party support...

I like to own physical media this allows me to loan my copies to my friends. I am not a fan of digital only media. I will buy a game as long as I get BOTH.

You don't count something in your figuring of the costs of optical media. Every disk produced costs publishers ~$7 if you count royalties, ~$10 if you count transportation and packaging along with retail space.

If a console manufacturer can release and sell hardware for a profit then they won't need to rely on as much in the way of royalties per disk and can easily subsidise the cost of a basic level of flash media, say 8 or 16gb and let publishers pay additional royalties if they wish to use higher capacity media. At least until the cost of flash starts to scale down to rock bottom levels.

See flash based retail packaging would cost less than half as much to transport, retailers would love it as they could fit more than twice as many games into the same space, and therefore the number of retailers willing to carry games would increase and unsold flash drives can be recycled and therefore recoop much of the production cost if a game bombs.

If you look at the hardware itself, optical drives make sense really only when you're looking at two current generation consoles duct taped together. Even then, Nintendo has shown that lowering hardware costs is one of the keys to success in the console business and im sure even if they want to follow on with another massive increase in performance that cutting the hardware costs to reasonable levels is a key factor in any possible success.

Lastly flash opens up some very real interesting future possibilities such as being able to rent games to completion instead of giving those pricks at gamestop a cent of your money. Also with downloads becoming more important, it will surely mitigate much of the cost of using flash media by balancing between the more expensive flash and the relatively cheaper online downloads (From a publishers perspective)

Affordability would be closer. Frugality would measure how tight a console is with money.

Although I think this discussion is interesting and I would love for games to distributed on flash drive, it simple isn't going to happen. The cost per gigabyte is too high and will ALWAYS be many times more expensive than optical media. Even if they can get it down to something as cheap as a dollar per drive (very unrealistic), that is still extremely expensive. The amount of money they would have made throughout the console's life with optical media would be in the hundreds of millions.

Time to stop being short sighted. People are giving examples in todays figures mostly because people are questioning the idea in todays values. This is an idiotic mistep. No one expects in reality to shift to flash tomorrow. In reality next generation will starting seeing the evolution of flash to cathup. It's the generation after will such an idea start becoming feasible. Only becuase if you look at the rate of flash space vs optical/HDD space increase vs cost flash is going faster. It's been mentioned again and again, but 8 gb flash just some months ago was really expensive. It's less than half the price. faster than other current mediums. If this idea is hard to understand well. it's not our problem. Heck I remember having to load games from tape cassette, then 3.5 720kb disks, 3.5 1.4mb disks, then finally cd, if you can't believe another tech will pass the current. then your being delusional.

In fairness, there are ways to cut those costs down to a more manageable level, and only so much data can be used at a given time with a reasonable budget.