PS3's avoidance of piracy has nothing to do with the expense of BD blanks, and everything to do with the security system in place. It's £5 for a BD blank now, more than enough for piracy to economically flourish. If the security was circumvented, most games would be able to be run from DVD+R DL any way - certainly, the debug stations allow for the running of code from them.
More than that, if PS3's security did fall, the demand for blank BDs would increase massively and the cost would tumble still further - 360 piracy proves that.
I'm struggling to understand the rest of your post - I just can't see the economics working, particularly when Sony has a vested interest in optical media. They make money not just from games software on BD, but movies too. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that BDs won't get cheaper to produce, but flash media will. Bearing in mind all the vested interests and the fact that the platform holders make money from the games, not the consoles, it simply makes sense to make the games as cheap to produce as possible.
5$ for a blank is still alot more expensive than 10 cents it costs for a blank dvd.
eastmen:
The cost of flash is measured in dollars. The cost of optical is measured in cents. Can you provide any logical reason why, if given a choice, a publisher would choose to cut profits by picking the more expensive media?
IIRC, ~70% of all games do not make a profit today. In your future scenario, assuming prices stay the same those same games would be taking an even bigger loss.
Do you have a link to whole sale prices of flash and do you have the whole sale prices of bluray ?
Just to play devils advocate(not that I think they will do this), but could all the games be digitally distributed via online or a bricks & mortar store? Microsoft just wouldn't have physical boxes with manuals, optical disks or expensive cartridges/flash/SSD. Microsoft could just require the consumer pay for the medium at cost. This way Microsoft, the publishers & developers wouldn't need to pay for the medium. You buy the cartridge/flash or whatever and then have your title transferred to it at check out.
Tommy McClain
We've discussed this earlier. You could sell the Rom cards at stores. Have a kiosk not much larger than the 360 and ps3 kiosks now that have terabytes of storage and can load games over the cost of a few days to the kiosk so you wouldn't need an extremely fast connection.
While I doubt that next gen will use carts, especially Sony, the idea does have some merit imo. 32GB carts might just be cheap and feasible enough in 2011 and onwards, if they dramatically help loading times. Right now it seems a optical disc drive will have difficulties filling up the RAM if there is 4GB of it.
I agree , even with an 8 times speed up on bluray it will still be to slow for 4GB , if they move to 8GB of ram forget about it .
might be possible to add few more dollars into retail prices of new games and MS might be reluctant to use Blu-ray, especially if the combination of digital distribution and carts could give them some other advantages aswell, like faster loading times,no standard HDD again in the entry level model, smaller size of the unit and less noise among other things.
Games went up $10 this gen. They can go up another $5 esp for early adopters.
edit: the cart interface should also be quite a lot cheaper than the Blu-ray drive, so there should be some cost benefits going with the cart also and not just additional expences. Imo it wouldn't be nearly as big of a mistake, what the N64 carts were at the time.
You can use a verison of USB 3.0 . It would be cheap and take up almost no room on the console
I've read in the past that the nintendo 64 carts cost upwards of 30 once the data was writen to the cart. That vs the pennies of cd. This time it be dollars if even vs dimes.
If you go the kiosk route , than you can have a console much cheaper than that of an optical console. With fast enough Rom set up you can do without a hardrive.
So
1) Smaller console = cheaper to produce , ship , keep stocked
2) no optical drive = cheaper to produce , no moving parts = less defective or broken units
3) No hardrive. Selling the system with ultra fast roms would do away with this.
The only way i can see SSD's being used is to use them as a transfer to a terabyte or larger harddisk, from a kiosk. That'd be large enough for people to have say 20 games on (enough for most people within a generation at least,) but then you have the problem that you have the hard disk and the SSD transfer device in the cost. You could keep a 2 times drive for movies on BR. You'd also use that SSD as a user identifier, so that no matter what system you were on you could download and play whatever game you were entitled to. Take you card and removeable HDD to a friends and you're good to go. Heck you could even transfer rights to a game. Aslong as the security on the SSD was fine there would be no problem.
I disagree , IF the price of the rom carts is cheap enough you don't need a hardrive. Bring the cost of games down a bit vs disc based games and sell large size roms for cheap. If they can get 64 gigs at $20-30 or esp 128gigs at that price point i don't think it matter.
the question is how many games would someone need to buy before that reusable SSD was more cost effective than just pressing the games on BR? And how's that balence against the advantages of less factory and floor space requirements and your whole catalogue avaliable permanently.
thats the question. It be great if not only on the kiosk you can buy games but you can also demo all the games on that kiosk.
You also have to figure if they go to a steam account like set up there wont be any used game market and their profits should go up.
