also another advantage of cartrages would be survivibility you only have to drop a disk once or twice to scratch it a few times, then when the disk gets to reading that point, it becomes jittery or just crashes NONE of my nes / snes / gameboy games have EVER been damaged this way, despite being in an environment with 4 children, all they have ever needed is the occasional blast of air to remove dust / dirt from the contacts and its all good to go again they all still work just fine ( still play some dragon warrior monsters on the gameboy colour from time to time ^_^ )
Storage density and expense. Prining a CD/DVD happened to be a lot cheaper than manufacturing an expensive cartridge.
I agree, where I live I can get 8gb flash for around £6 and that's for a shop own brand, going upto £15 for a well known brand, then add the packaging and design for each type of game. So the gaming industry will still want to make their £40 and $60 per game, to add another media that costs more will increase the costs to £50+ and $60+ with the likely hood of extra security meaning that there will be no trade in, so you will not be able to get some of that money back. One of the best things from using flash is their size you could get alot more on, but then they will lose out of DLCs that have been created because of media size. If they want to do something different and I would go for it is using cloud gaming, you can rent or buy from Sony or MS and there's no worry about media or even hardware. My only problem is if your only entertainment is gaming (like me with being a carer) and your internet connection goes down or your ISP are having issues and it's on and off, then it can get a bit frustrating when your almost there in a game.
A new generation of gamers blowing into their cartridges to get them to work It'd be good if they brought them back imo, they were much better! Lets hope tapes dont make a comeback....
30 minute load times with a 50% chance of chewing it up? Not likely. I remember a time when I went outside to play football between game loads.
Likely nowt to do with piracy (which wouldn't be affected by the media used anyway - CD-ROMs were touted as "piracy proof" not too many years ago), it's to block second-hand sales and to ensure that suckers owners pay more for their games. The production costs for a disc are pretty marginal and a lot less than flash memory currently (£0.27 per disc for a run of 20,000 compared to £4.44 for the cheapest 8GB SD card). However the main check against high pricing is competition - if second-hand sales are blocked and piracy limited, then expect far higher prices as a result. This has been the case ever since the 8-bit days of computing (when "piracy prone" formats like the ZX Spectrum or Atari ST saw lower game prices than competing platforms such as the BBC or Amiga/IBM PC) and has continued through every console generation (compared to PC equivalents).
30 minutes! I dont remember having to wait that long, but it was a while back. I do remember having to turn over the tape though
Or the anguished screams when somebody knocked the desk with the tape drive on, causing the load to crash!
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/343191/next-xbox-to-boast-ridiculously-powerful-16-core-cpu/ 16 core IBM PPC? I find it hard to believe.
If they get a steam type system where every game is locked to your account the console boys will be raging. But Pc does seem to lead the way. That would be a sweet machine.
As much as I would like it to be true, I don't see consoles moving to flash unless the price drops dramatically. A double layer bluray can hold 50GB. A 32GB flash sd/drive costs around $25. I don't see publishers eating that, even if it drops by more than half. I also don't see MS licensing bluray as unreasonable. If they do go with disc media, it's their only option. One of the reasons some x-platform AAA games didn't use BRs to their full potential was because they were limited by DVD size, and publishers probably didn't want to ship on multiple DVDs. But next gen games are definitely going to need more space than 2-3 dual layer DVDs and will probably creep towards the 50GB size of dual layer BRs.
That raises questions on the viability of digital distribution then. Because a 50GB game is nothing to scoff at. Although it would hilariously reduce piracy.
Depends how each the PPC cores are to use and what they are all needed for. HD7000 series is supposed to be 7670 - 480 shaders.
Lets not forget HDDVD. I wouldn't be surprised if it, or something based on it made a comeback for the next Xbox. Proprietary disk technology would have the benefit of detering pirates, and avoid the licensing fees associated with using Blu Ray.
hmmm, I love it when predictions like this come around. It'd be far too rude for me to comment or speculate on USB sticks though....
People your not comparing flash prices correctly I dout Sony pays anything close to £4.44 per 8gb of flash, they are not a consumer More like 50-75pence 256bit encryption is bank level security if it's added to flash cards they won't be hacked easily Ms and Sony don't want to kill second hand market developers do
Well seeing as MS and Sony get a good proportion of their earnings from every game sold, I'd say that they want to see the second hand game market die just as much as the publishers/devs.
