It is a dead medium, as you are pointing out.

Possibly.

@Squill
And still: using flash as a transient medium to download from kisosk is sort of a a given, but that's not the same as saying that you buy your games on flash sticks that then lie around unused when you're not playing that specific game. If you use flash as a transport medium only, you use it for transport but have not paid for quantities of silicon lying around unused.
And again I fail to see how flash is in any way more secure than optical disks. It's all in the decrypting and authentication and the only way to control that tightly is by using a central remote server.

Basically I'm saying that if all games are going to play from the console's solid state storage and will be authenticated in a homogeneous way with digital downloaded contet, it doesn't matter what the physical medium actually is. Thus for general retail why shuldn't you go with the cheaper option?

As for your ideas about space needing to be restricted: the optical medium could have space enough, for example, to contain all the different localizations whereas when you download you choose one. Again, much cheaper for the publisher.

It's dead to movie studios, but can easily come back for a gaming medium. Even then, I will bet you cash that if there's a huge demand, HD-DVD would make a comeback. Folks are still buying HD-DVDs due to lower costs and the like.

This.

So you are proposing a single solid state drive in a console that essentially caches a game from the optical media giving you cheap distribution via current methods, yet the access speed of a cartridge? Is that right?

The biggest problem I see with this is that you will need to install the game every time you play it. That's a massive pain in the ass. There's no way that even in 3 years that you'll be able to have 250-500GB SSD in a console for cheap enough to be mass market price. You'd need that much space to allow you to preinstall multiple games at once.

DVD with 10 discs autochanger

Why "every time you play it"? The console software might be smart enough to keep content cached for all the games you are lately playing, to make space when you haven't touched a game in months and to perform background installation/precaching in multiple stages.

Nowadays installers are simply stupid, because they inherited their design from general-purpose PC procedures. Why can't the game initially install just the content required so that the player can start to -you know- play, instead of the whole GBs? Additional installation can happen during title screens or in other moments in which the CPU and IO is available.

And why doesn't it work a bit like with browsers, that can cache single images from a website and erase or keep them based on their use? The content of a game could be split in modules, some of them kept cached, others re-loaded or cached as needed and later removed for space.

It's not like the consoles will lack CPU or IO power next gen to perform these tasks in the background - they could even have one of their umpteens cores dedicated to these OS operations. So the only downside is that you might have longer load times the very first time you play a game or if you do so after its cached content was erased, where longer means as in today's games that are played from discs.

As to the cost of SSD, they are still high, yes. Yet in 3 years time they'll likely drop sharply if the current trend with netbooks and smartphones pushes the tech into mass adoption. And nothing holds consoles from having a simple expansion port where you plug extra flash ram or even an extra SSD so that the available space can be incremented as its price/GB plummets.

Squilliam's  scenario: the console has a Flash cartridge port, each game carries its own Ram. Cons: cost of the medium, because you are paying for N Flash sticks, and then use only one of them at a time. Pro: each game can be plugged in and played at flash-read-speed right from the first time.

My scenario: the console has a Flash cartridge port (or maybe SSD slot) for expansion of the internal SSD. The software comes in whatever way (optical disks, image downloaded on an external USB HD or USB Flash stick), the OS of the console deals with the installation/caching on the SSD. Con: precaching occupies CPU and IO. Pro: multiple,cheaper ways of distribution, with less limitations on games size.

@gattino della rana

What if the console hardware from Microsoft next generation is multi-purpose? For example if they want Xbox hardware to be embedded into cars, cable boxes, TVs etc wouldn't it be easier if the media itself were flash based?

I've already seen a demonstration of Natal controlling a TV with an Xbox 360 NXE interface and the games on demand service is something I saw way back from CES this year.

Im not suggesting flash drives because I think its the cheapest or even strictly the best alternative for a pure console, however it doesn't look like the Xbox next will be a pure console even in the standalone sense.

Wont use a physical medium nex gen