The bluray games haven't been cracked, except for the bus glitch, and that hole was closed later on. I don't see what the gain would be for the ridiculous expense of small capacity carts with "smart" circuitry. Once a console is cracked and mod-chipped, the smart circuit won't be of any use anyway.
Hybrid BluRays allows a lot of flexibility for a dollar per disk, and the advantages of the standardized bluray "press" is dwarfing any expensive cart production, with up to 1TB disks in 2014. There's no reason for carts this generation, or even the next (which should be all networked). Unless we are in the line of thinking that "8GB should be enough for anyone". Some developers need that additional space, specially RPGs and MMOs. I'm guessing Everquest Next will need much more than 25GB, these people LOVE high detail textures and huge worlds
But it could be good to have carts if the next generation of PORTABLES can read last gen home consoles... I'm pipe dreaming here... I was sure the next nintendo portable would read my gamecube disks and that it was the reason for their small size... bummer.
Really ?
I can download uncharted 3 right now . So i don't see how Bluray hasn't been cracked.
Also SD cards do have the option of security .
While 1TB discs might be possible at some point , how fast will a 4x bluray drive read them ? On that 10th layer or whatever how well will it work , how bad will the switching times be. Will it even be usable in a next gen console .
Lets face it , bluray is damn slow and the more ram we get next gen the slower it will be .
Games like ever quest next or whatever MMORPG wil lrequire an internet connection anyway and you can make them DD only to the hardrive.
Also no one assumes just 8 GB. However I think 16gigs at launch is fine. It more than doubles the xbox's current capacity and its much faster. Use true hd instead of LCPM and i'm sure other compression will get better. There is also tessellation too and i wonder how much that will decrease game size .
PRices on dram exchange were posted earlier , but we have no idea what nm sized chips those are and they are MLC which we don't need in a console. TLC is really all thats needed since there would be a handfull of times you'd write to the disc .
Lets also not forget how popular the Xbox 360 S and the ps3 slim are. There is a huge market for smaller consoles , I think sony's sucess with the psone and pstwo proved it and MS's sucess with the S also proved it .
A disk driveless console should be much smaller than one with it. Also since your removing anywhere from $20-$50 per console the disk driveless console can have other advantages.
What would happen if The ps4 shiped with a 6x bluray and 4 gigs of ram but the xbox loop or whatever launches with flash and 8 gigs of ram.
There will be an incentive for people to buy the xbox because the greater ram will allow them have more impressive visuals .
$20-$50 can do alot to increase the specs of the console and its a cost advantage that will most likely never go away in the future
And hey , just like you look to the future of bluray , flash also has a future . Speeds will go up and so will capacity . We might start at 16 gigs with 60MB/s read times but we can end up with 128 gigs with 200MB/s read times by the end of the console generation , esp if we see another 7 or 8 year gen. That can't be said for a bluray drive. They will have to code to the original drives forever , or sony would have to buy out the original systems from the owners.
