All hail the thread necromancer!

Anyway, on topic.  I would personally love a return to cartridges/cards for home consoles games.  However I think the cost will be prohibitive for at least the 9th generation.  However, by the time the cost is reasonable, maybe DD would've become standard.

Noot gonna re-read this whole thread so I'll just say this:

I have PSV/3DS games on cartridge that have load times. I have PSN/XBLA games that aren't on DVD/Blu Ray and still load and have pop up. I have games installed to my 360's HDD that don't feature dramatic performance improvements.

This is why digital distribution may eventually be the norm as it installs directly on your HD and loading times are minimal. I do however prefer physical ownership of games, as they are easier to share and I like being able to have a collection of games.

Cartridges will never be cheaper then discs. If we still get hvd before everything goes digital only it's more likely we'll see smaller discs again like the game cube used. However it's far more likely we'll get online only consoles. Maybe next gen already with a separate sku with an optical drive. Hdds will be replaced by ssd drives, but not yet next gen. (hopefully optional like the ps3)

For now blu-ray is here to stay. There's still plenty of room to play with and so far we've only had a x2 drive in the ps3. The 360 has a x12 dvd drive, a x12 blu-ray drive will reduce those install times dramatically. Most games are probably going to run of the hdd next gen with only the movie assets directly streamed from disk.

@BasilZero

I want Digital copies to be the norm, but it seems that further we go to the future, the less bandwidth we have for our internet. 5 years ago most people had unlimited high speed internet. Now the most we get is a 200 gig upload download. If that's on a single blu ray, that's 50 gigs.....download alone. I would rahter just get a physical copy.

@d21lewis
Everything DOES have load time, BUT CD based games seem to have hair ripping load times. Also anything on a hard drive is faster than a cd based, BUT slower than SSD. Solid state hard drives are insanely fast compared to Sata2. In general the 3DS load time is less than the CD that they have these days. When I say CD based it means blu ray also.