By that logic, we could have claimed 2 gens ago

Sony will not do this, CD will be fine for many years to come. The costs of Cds will be lower than DVD when it releases to the public. Plus, Dont they already have 700mb Cds? I thought Pioneer had made one.

And 1 gen ago

Sony will not do this, DVD will be fine for many years to come. The costs of DVDwill be lower than BR when it releases to the public. Plus, Dont they already have 9.8 Gb DVDS? I thought Pioneer had made one.

The article title had a question mark, which you didn't put in there. Sounded like a report, rather than a theory.

Anyway, the first thing wrong with that article was that no new consoles are coming in 2011. It's too soon. They are all selling far too well. No GameCubes or Xbox 1s here.

And of course, when HVDs come at Blu-ray's launch price, Blu-ray will be much cheaper. And it appears that this is basically an upgraded blu-ray: it can be read by standard Blu-ray players.

As for what games will be made on...depends on pricing, more than anything else.

Those aren't really fair analogies. DVDs were used for gaming when they'd been out for years, the same for CDs. Your arguments about space aren't even analogous since there were never 700 MB DVDs or 9.8 GB Blu-ray discs.

Honestly why debate the technical merits. That is not the reality of this situation. The reality is this we are seeing the bigger dick philosophy at work. Which I assure you the many Sony fans on this site would attest too if they were not terribly biased, and too self righteous to admit that it was exactly what they were thinking when the PS3 launched.

What I am talking about is the correlation between storage capacity and the size of ones dick. A large legion of consumers can only make this correlation in respect to technology. That is what will drive this technology into the next consoles. The ability to look at a machine and say this runs a media that stores ten times more then this. Thus if I buy it then my dick will be ten times bigger then the guy who buys the other one. That means I am a more powerful person.

They want to think that they will kick the other guy into a prone position, and dick whip his face into utter humiliation. Reality be damned. The very need be damned. This exact same thing happened this generation. I want those that bought a PS3 to honestly question some of their motivation. That extra storage that only plays out in a relative handful of games was a real motivator for you. Functionality or use do not matter when it comes to the bigger dick philosophy which is what these industries rely upon.

That said I will say the following. Sony has no choice in this question period. They pillaged their savings for the PS3, will have suffered a recession, and have leveraged and borrowed themselves to the hilt. Simply put they no longer have the cash to loss lead. Hell they will need to sell their next console at a significant profit. Which means they are going to cling to their format. Probably not the architecture mind you. The Cell has far too few buyers which doesn't allow for cost cutting. Off the shelf technology will be cheaper.

Microsoft on the other hand has all the incentive. They too are a loss leader. The difference is they have a dominant market position, have a strong online service, and have subscriptions. Which means they have the money to burn, and it means they can take the last ground left to Sony. They will want the technological superiority with no doubt attached, and that means not just the same drive, but a more powerful one. Microsoft isn't going to let Sony be. They have every intention of crushing them out of the market. Beating Sony on all points is the way to do that.

Remember Microsoft doesn't want to coexist with Sony. They want to destroy Sony to remove the threat permanently. So with the money they will have they will take the last audience that Sony might have a solid hand on, and that would be the hardware heads.

I do not think Sony or Microsoft are going to use this.

Sony invested heavily in Blu-ray and Cell. There has to be a undeniably good reason for them to pull out now. Blu-ray is doing satisfactory. Unfortunately, the Cell has not really proven to be much of a success so that is what they are most likely going to focus on.

Microsoft most likely will not use this either as long as the technology remains expensive. If this technology also requires very high hardware specs to work decently, it is pretty much guaranteed that Microsoft will avoid this. The reason is because there has never been a console manufacture that sold consoles at a high loss or price and been anywhere close to winning the console war. What makes you think Microsoft is going to be any different if they tried?

If next generation consoles appear after 2012 and the cost of this technology drops by 2011, there is the possibility of either of the companies utilizing this.

The reason why I am so hesitant to consider BR playback as a viable option for some future consoles are the licencing fees. People think that its terrible that consumers buy a PS3 to play BR, I think its even more terrible for Sony if they buy it and ignore BR. If we consider the current fee of $9.50 per player, if only 10% of people buying a PS3 actually use that capability for example then the cost per console of those 10% would be $95 and they would be better off enabling playback using something like a remote and dropping the price by $10 -> See wireless networking argument 107 Xbox 360. 

Its something they have to pay per console whether its used or not, so going forward into the future if fewer consoles are expected to be used for this functionality then I would expect that even if BR players are inside the next Xbox that people will have to pay extra for a remote to enable the functionality. This is especially true if the next generation consoles are designed even more to be internet media hubs rather than designed to play locally stored optical media.

@Squilliam
I would have said that the more we move the consoles toward becoming media hubs, the bigger the share of people that will use them for optical media instead of using a stand-alone player.

But I'm not following your reasoning. Take the Wii: it does not play DVDs, even though it uses them for game storage.
I doubt that most Wii games are substantially larger than Gamecube ones, yet they moved from their weird miniDVDs to DVDs as optical support, probably because the most common storage medium has lower costs for burning, printing, packaging etc.
What keeps MS from doing the same, or even Sony though that's unlikely? That is, use the cheapest storage medium that offers the necessary size, enable playback of BR videos on-demand? Actually, all media functionalities (audio and video codecs, ripping capabilities, sharing files over network, exporting audio/video to mobile devices, streaming from various sources) could be managed by microtransactions, downloading the needed system software from the manufacturer's online shop.

Your logic doesn't take into account the current and near future data usage.  Using math, next gen will NOT be using 400GB of space.  Going from 480p to 720p is a 4x jump in resolution.  Therefore, a 4x jump in storage space would work out.  Going from 720p to 1080p is a 2x jump in resolution.  50GB x 2 = 100GB.  The odd game may use 150GB.  200GB is PLENTY headroom for the growth in next-gen games.

^Uhm, actually with a fixed aspect ratio of say 16/10:

1080p = 2.25 x 720p = 2.25 x 2.25 x 480p (in pixel count)

But that's before compression, and only for raw video data, so it's not an exact multiplier you can use for a mixed content like a game that is made of code, textures, audio, geometry data, videos etc.

@Werekitten, The Wii plays DVD discs, but to enable DVD playback Nintendo would have to pay the DVD forum a fee per Wii sold whether the ability was used or not.