Let me rephrase that... If they become cheap enough to be mass market for consoles. I doubt games will ship on solid state drives, since optical media is less than a dollar per copy. Yet a solid state drive would make a good console component. My ideal future is kiosks at game stores where you can plug in a removable SSD or a whole console and directly dload the game to your console if you dont want to do it over your home internet connection.

@Bardicverse: If games go to DD only, i would bet that we'd see the kind of kiosks.

Even without cartridges or similar, loading times will be much better in the next gen due to faster optical drives. Graphics won't improve much so data quantity shouldn't increase much either. Add in a 4-8 times faster drive and you can see what happens.

 Ah, yeah, I understand what you're saying. That's how I'll personally see it. Also, this would mean that an optical drive would be useless, and with other wireless technologies (including transferring the rendered output to the television/sound device), consoles will shrink down in size.

I personally think that within the next 10-20 years (so, 15) handhelds and home consoles may become the same thing. You just chose whether you use the system's onboard screen/controls or wirelessly connect to everything else.

I also see the laptop getting replaced by a mobile phone which you can connect to a wireless docking station for full use. Desktop computers will merely become monitors with wireless keyboards/mice (though those would become pointless with voice recognition and touchscreen).

A <£100 phone in a decade will have more power than your typical average computer/camera/music playing device combined.

Sorry for straying off the point, but I can't wait for the future. It excites me.

(Which reminds me... I was watching Futurama the other day, can't remember which episode, but Fry was playing a game console which used wired controllers. It made me laugh, and it wasn't even meant to be a joke).

 With much more powerful processors, we could see that procedural graphics actually reduces data sizes, which would also help contribute to quicker load times).

@SamuelRSmith: What you basically are meaning is, that the more built-in hardware features there is, the less you need to write code for it? Since outside data compressing that's the only way i can see the save in space required (and of course, more powerful processor decompresses faster).

Obviously not cartridges, as we knew them, but solid-state memory could make a comeback. Certainly it's here to stay in the handheld world (UMD has proven time and again to be the PSP's bane). It all depends on whether or not solid-state begins to bid up more rapidly than optical discs, and if it occurs before this whole holographic memory thing (where a Terrabyte is an insignificant measure) comes down and makes it all obsolete anyway

Definitely not next-gen, but it's possible. Just have to see the trends in optical media, and how soon it will fall out of favor

Its really hard to fathom what the next 10 years will bring technology wise. 10 years ago you couldnt have told me that Id be playing a console that was wireless AND had wireless internet AND had motion sensing capabilities.

As for the laptop, its possible, with better browsing capabilities, the laptop will be more productivity based, but the average email/internet/chat user will only need a $200-$300 cell phone.

@bdbdbd - It just seems to be going that direction more and more. 6 months ago people argued with me that digital distribution of movies would never catch on. Now more and more businesses like Netflix are promoting digital distribution.

Yeah, the more powerful the hardware, the less space is required. What I mean about procedural graphics is that instead of storing a texture file, you store the commands needed to render a texture file.

I don't know how far your understanding of bitmapped graphics go, but essentially, it's done by storing the colour of each individual picture.

If, for example, you had a 32*32 pixel graphic, and it's broken into four squares of individual colour (each square being 8*8). A bitmap would need to store  information on 1,024 pixels - which would require 8,192 bits (assuming 8bits per pixel which is what is required for 256 colour) which is 1mb (1,024 bytes)

Now, instead of having 1mb used up storing this graphic, you could just store an algorithm which says "render a square of 8*8 in colour A, then colour B, colour C and colour D" - which would save space.

This really starts to add up when you start taking more complex textures into consideration.

Nope... DLC is the way of the future.