you never owned a c64 with tape deck did you?? You would have hated the loading times there big time, serioulsy the time it takes to load from DVD's and Blurays is hardly even noticeable, not to mention some games feature a hardrive installation feature (reduces loading times even more).

The only benefit I personally liked with cartridges is that they can take much more abuse and can't be scratched like a CD/DVD/BR can. Although BR disc are a little harder to scratch up. Plus correct me if I'm wrong but don't cartridges have a longer shelf live than optical media?

Anything was better than those damn Blue/Purple bottom disc games for the PS2. Loading times don't bother me at all since I have patience like Buddha.

Heh, I was thinking about making a similar thread...

I'd actually like optical discs to become obsolete completely; I hate the bloody things (unfortunately, I'm sure they'll stay around for a long time). If they were replaced by something like flash memory sticks or cards, then apart from anything else, we'd be able to save a lot of space (allowing consoles to be made smaller and laptops to have room for other stuff (incidentally, disc drives in laptops can often be taken out and replaced with a second hard drive)). Things would be quieter (this is an especially big issue with laptops, whose disc drives are often insanely loud), and I'd assume that not having moving parts would save power as well (although I might be wrong about this).

However, I don't see any kind of cartridge or flash memory replacing optical discs for game distribution. Flash memory seems to be following Moore's law as far as I can tell, the cost per GB will be much lower in 10 years time, but I don't think their cost per GB will ever be as low as that of optical discs. Companies that sell tens of millions of units of software/whatever on optical discs will be reluctant to change since even an extra $1.00 per unit will be a big cost. Even if flash memory or somethign similar does become cheap enough, it might not happen before digital downloads become feasible. Of course, even that might take a while; tens of GB are a lot to download for people in areas with bad connections or who have limited downloads per month, and it would take some pretty awesome servers to deal with millions of people simultaniously downloading big releases (like whatever the equivalent of MW2 will be for future generations).

We also have to bear in mind that games might continue to grow in size at the rate they've been growing over the past three generations.There are reasons why this might not be necessary, but it could still happen. PSX games could usually fit on a 650MB CD, PS2 games were usually a couple of gigs and PS3 games are sometimes over 30GB. The next generation will almost certainly have games that stretch the current 66GB limit for dual layered blu-rays and it's likely that some will go past that. The generation after that might have games that are hundreds of gigs in size (that sounds crazy now, but who would have thought 10 years ago that games would be 40GB like FF13?). We need to think not about whether the distribution method we're talking about dominating future generations is feasible for today's games, but about whether it will be feasible for games in the future, which will probably be much bigger.

Yeah. I think optical discs will still be used as the main distribution method in the generation after the next one.

who cares as long as good games are still being made

It boils down to the simple issue of cost effectiveness, which was the real reason game distro moved to optical formats in the first place.

While it would be nice to pick up a 8GB game on a chip with a read speed that matched 3.0gbps HDD speeds for the same price as a disk that cost less than a dollar to press, that's a bit of a pipe dream. When you start factoring in games that measure in at 25+GB published on BD, it starts looking a bit more like a crack pipe dream.

I see digital distro becoming more of a standard before that day actually comes.

yeah, I guess your right, they can do that.  The problems that do arrise is that next gen if you use HVDs for example that can hold theoritically 1 TB of data.(I think I can't remember right now), I don't want to wait that long to download that, especially in my area.  In my area I don't know about all, but most ISPs have bandwidth cap, meaning I would have to pay by the gig to download more than the cap.  If I have an 80 gig cap per month, then this will really fail for me and I will be picking up a physical copy.  Also it IS a little faster, but I still would have to wait proabaly a couple of days to download  even 500gigs. (didn't do that math for speed, I apologize if it seems wrong.)

 nope never, but yeah, I've heard of the horrendous load times on those.  Also I hate games that need installation.  If a friend of mine wants to try out a game, and I don't have it installed, I would have to wait for it to install.  Personally I think you should be able to choose to install or not on a console.

 they are getting chaeper.  what's the max capacity right now 32 gigs?  not sure, but a year from now a 32 gigs chip won't be as expensive as it is now.

That is one major caveat which I think ultimately means we will not see download only for at least 1 more generation possibly 2. The end user is not going to want to be waiting for a couple days while their game downloads. In a couple years, yeah, 25-50 gig game downloads are viable, not 1TB though.

That said, there will be tons of games that fall in between a while spectrum of game sizes. The previous gen games can all be re-released via download. Many games in the current gen, minis, etc, maybe in more than half of all games released on any given console, can be done via download. But the rest are indeed going to need physical a medium to distribute. Whether that just means USB ROM drives or they go ahead and stick with BDR or HVD who knows yet. This is already the case anyway. Tons of games are being made exclusively download only, though those are called by special names Mini, Arcade, WiiWare. 

@ greenmedic88 sorry to bud in but I thought you might like to know that the higher end SD cards can store up to 1 terabyte; but if your willing to spend 300 hundred bucks for it, by all means knock your self out.

As flash memory becomes cheaper to make, so does optical disk storage. I believe "once only write" storage such as optical disks are easier to make than flash.

seriously?  didn't know that.  Well if that's $300 now, that means it's gonna cost less than $30 10 yeasr from now.  I don't really know how these price saving thig work, hahahahaha.  Though since my topic said 10 years from now, this SD card will be faster to read than HVD.