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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Optical drives need to be kicked to the curb! Flash is the next-gen future.

jetrii on 16 December 2008
Khuutra said:

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.

 

 Although it's true that flash drives will become extremely cheap in time, the very fact that they are flash based means their cost can only be reduced by so much and optical discs will always be physically easier to produce. Personally, I think console makers should go with a system a friend and I brainstormed a while back that benefits both retailers and console makers. I honestly see some sort of new read-only technology coming out of nowhere and replacing both flash and optical media before I can see flash taking over.



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The Anarchyz on 16 December 2008
.jayderyu said:
The Anarchyz said:
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...

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.

It's true, i used today's figures, but people is talking about next gen, not the one after, and next gen is due by 2011 or 2012 aproximately, by that time flash media will still be more expensive overall... Now, if we talk about the gen starting in 2017-2018 then it will be possible... And of course i don't have to believe about one tech succeeding another, because is not a belief, is a fact, but as i said, people is talking about next gen, and i don't see that happening next gen...

Squilliam, you bring royalties into the argument, but do you think that with flash this thing will dissapear? it's not that easy... The transport part is true because of the size, but that will not depend on the flash media, it will depend on the cases, check this image for example:

PS3 cases are shorter than the GAMECUBE ONES, by logic the GC should have shorter cases because of the 8 cm media, but they don't. We don't know if they are gonna take advantage of the flash size, and the consumers must be pleased too, because many of them (including me) love the cases, bootleg and the artwork, hell some 360/PS3 owners are willing to buy the FFXIII 360 version to get more artwork (because of the multiple discs)...

I'm for the flash media, but next-gen it won't happen...



Squilliam on 16 December 2008

@The Anarchyz

Flash based media doesn't have to be as cheap as optical disks to be effective. Because the Xbox 360 can only store 6.8GB of data per disk they could easily get away with 8gb sized flash drives for media. There are other compelling reasons for going with flash, significant compelling reasons. A lot of games at the start of the next generation will be simple ports of the current generation and 6.8GBs is the standard which Microsoft has disctated to the industry through their success.

Take the Xbox 360, it comes without a HDD. Effective strategy? Yes its currenty able to be sold for $200 because it doesn't have the fixed cost of the HDD constantly pushing the price up. Take that mindset one further and having an SKU without HDD or Optical drive with a minimum of flash for saved games starts to make perfect sense.

As for the price of the media, they could easily charge $5 more next generation for games, $4/1 split between the console manufacturer and retailer to pay for the extra cost of the media if they have to. To be quite frank really, the console manufacturing costs are far too high at the moment to be tenable. So much money is spent on hardware just to make up for the failings of the optical media.



Tease.

Kyros on 16 December 2008

Every disk produced costs publishers ~$7


The disc itself costs not more than 1-2$ depending if they are single or double layer. The packaging, etc. would have to be done for flash memory in addition to a much higher price for the medium itself.



NJ5 on 16 December 2008
Squilliam said:
NJ5 said:
heruamon said:
I just love it when people throw out numbers...kinda like...You'll never need mor ethan 640 kb...or maybe many of you are simply too young to remember that...or that the PC was never going to appeal to the masses. Flash memory is the future, and looking at how the cost has shrunk in the last 3 years, WITHOUT a major catalyst, I can see it being a viable median for the future. It's small and compact, and uses less power, generates less heat, and is cooler to tote around (okay...no scientific data for this one).

It's just not very clear to me that the costs will be low enough for the next generation.

 

You've been saying how the hardware costs on the PS3 won't scale well with time due to proprietary technology. The costs are high enough this generation really.

You have:

  • Optical Drive $20-40 at launch.
  • HDD $30-40 at launch.
  • Extra memory, motherboard complexity $10
  • Packaging also cannot scale as well, as an optical drive must always be fitted
  • Total: $60-90 in fixed costs which will hardly drop for the lifetime of the console.

 

 

 

 

You're talking about fixed costs. What I 'm suspicious of are the costs of putting each copy of a game in flash. I haven't yet seen an argument for why these costs will be negligible even in 2011 for a big game (as they are with optical media especially DVD right now). $5 for 16 GB of storage media alone isn't acceptable I suspect (and that's not the current price).

BTW, why did you mention HDD? That wouldn't be removed, at most it could be turned into Solid State Drive which is not free. Also it has nothing to do with game media, it's required either way for downloads etc.

 



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Fumanchu on 16 December 2008

Yeah good luck convincing publishers to wear the extra costs associated - this would be major boycott worthy, you'd want to be sure your competitors are going the same route.

I'm hoping that they all release cheaper sku's next gen without an optical drive with download distribution as the primary method, but a dearer sku with a blu-ray drive for people without speedy broadband, with downloaded games retailing $10 cheaper as well. Screw the retailers.



Squilliam on 16 December 2008
Fumanchu said:
Yeah good luck convincing publishers to wear the extra costs associated - this would be major boycott worthy, you'd want to be sure your competitors are going the same route.

I'm hoping that they all release cheaper sku's next gen without an optical drive with download distribution as the primary method, but a dearer sku with a blu-ray drive for people without speedy broadband, with downloaded games retailing $10 cheaper as well. Screw the retailers.

Good luck with getting retailers to stock it at less than 20% profit margins, if at all. Meaning it would cost more than the optical drive SKUs or you wouldn't be able to get it at all.

 



Tease.

Fumanchu on 16 December 2008

I'm sure a new wholesale retailer would emerge in their place if that were the case. Heck, I'd start my own business selling them.



Squilliam on 16 December 2008
NJ5 said:
Squilliam said:
NJ5 said:
heruamon said:
I just love it when people throw out numbers...kinda like...You'll never need mor ethan 640 kb...or maybe many of you are simply too young to remember that...or that the PC was never going to appeal to the masses. Flash memory is the future, and looking at how the cost has shrunk in the last 3 years, WITHOUT a major catalyst, I can see it being a viable median for the future. It's small and compact, and uses less power, generates less heat, and is cooler to tote around (okay...no scientific data for this one).

It's just not very clear to me that the costs will be low enough for the next generation.

 

You've been saying how the hardware costs on the PS3 won't scale well with time due to proprietary technology. The costs are high enough this generation really.

You have:

  • Optical Drive $20-40 at launch.
  • HDD $30-40 at launch.
  • Extra memory, motherboard complexity $10
  • Packaging also cannot scale as well, as an optical drive must always be fitted
  • Total: $60-90 in fixed costs which will hardly drop for the lifetime of the console.

 

 

 

 

You're talking about fixed costs. What I 'm suspicious of are the costs of putting each copy of a game in flash. I haven't yet seen an argument for why these costs will be negligible even in 2011 for a big game (as they are with optical media especially DVD right now). $5 for 16 GB of storage media alone isn't acceptable I suspect (and that's not the current price).

BTW, why did you mention HDD? That wouldn't be removed, at most it could be turned into Solid State Drive which is not free. Also it has nothing to do with game media, it's required either way for downloads etc.

 

Flash is currently produced on the 50nm process node. At 30nm a 10mm by 10mm area of flash will likely be up 2.5* as dense. So if you had 1gb on that flash, you would now have 2.5gb. Intels 32nm process looks to be coming on stream by the end of 2009, so it does follow that they could easily start producing flash at the 22nm and fit over 4* as many transistors in the same area of silicon. So that flash you can buy on Newegg for $5 which contains 4gb of storage, will easily hold 4x that quantity by the time the next generation consoles are being produced.

I mentioned HDDs as they will become a required part of the console kit as optical drives simply are not fast enough to deliver the content a more modern console will require in a timely manner.

 



Tease.

scottie on 16 December 2008
Squilliam said:
  • 1/50th the latency of optical media, 0.2 MS vs 10 MS for most optical drives.

 

Student's nitpicking time.

 

What you just wrote then reads

 

1/50th the latency of optical media, 0.2 Mega Seconds vs 10 Mega Seconds for most optical drives.

 

A Mega second is 1000 seconds. That's a lot of latency. To be honest I thought flash drives would have a latency closer to 0.2 mS, which is 1 millionth of what you said it is.

 

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what you're suggesting, there are a few ways flash could be used for games

If you're meaning USB sticks, then you won't get great read speeds or latency, if you're meaning an internal flash drive, then consoles would be very pricey