When do you think the "next-gen" consoles will be announced?

Indeed, Nintendo refusing to make the N64 support CD-Roms is cited to this day as the biggest factor in its failures on the market. No one in this industry is ever going to make a cartridge based console again because of that, least of all Nintendo.

Traditional carts? No shit.

Solid-state storage in general? That's kinda another story. SD cards are rapidly getting cheaper, and, in general, increase storage space dramatically - SDXC cards capable of reaching up to 2TB. It'll take surprisingly little time for solid-state storage to surpass Blu-Ray in both price and space.

The only real possible direction for disc-based storage to go, in any case, is holographic storage. General Electric probably is the closest to getting such tech onto the market at a affordable price, at "less than 10 cents per GB", which will decrease rapidly, and 500GB, while less than I was hoping, still makes Blu-Ray look like utter crap.

In any case, I honestly see Nintendo adopting holographic storage tech first, since they were working with another pioneer on holographic storage tech, though no news had come out of that partnership before said pioneer ended up closing its doors earlier this year. Hell, they might pull out another Gamecube and just use their own proprietary optical media solution, with a drive that can read DV Ds and Gamecube disks for backwards compatibility.

There was nothing special about the GCN/Wii's discs, they're just perfectly normal DVDs recorded as CAV (which reduces their capacity) for DRM reasons. Again, say that a cart only costs $4 to make, that's several hundred times more than a stamped DVD or BR disc.

The only way I can imagine solid state being used for a set-top's retail is with the kiosk model, where you pay to have games loaded onto media you buy separately.

edited 31st Oct '10 8:14:22 PM by EricDVH

Besides, consoles can already use Solid-State, but as a replacement to Memory Cards and for digitally downloaded games. The only thing that will replace disks is digital distribution and the market is not ready for it yet outside of Apple.

edited 1st Nov '10 12:45:18 AM by GameGuruGG