The end of optical drives

Will the next generation of consoles have optical drives at all? Internal HDs or even flash cards both seem like options at the moment but is it too soon? Will they make the leap? Honestly I think Nintendo will probably do it first, they never liked using discs and I still think they lament the "death" of the cartridge for non-portable systems. A cartridge was costly to produce, sure, but the loading times were nonexistent. 
 
Sony on the other hand, is probably the last company that will consider ditching optical drives. The investments they've made in blu Ray tech is considerable and ditching it now would turn heads I think. And look how well they handled a drive-free portable system.

You need really big hardrives in order to do that, not sure if it's cost effective. A 2 TB hd isn't going to last you a whole gen for games, well it might.

I think Blu-Ray is just really gaining ground, and I don't see it being replaced next gen. Maybe next next gen, but not next gen.

People with Steam seem to do OK.

Well there's the cloud storage that you get with Steam, I think that's a viable option.

The biggest issue of cloud computing in a larger scale is consumer internet. Bandwidth limits suck.

It depends on how far off the next gen of consoles is I think.
 
I'd guess MS will want to go no-optical first because they might not want to license bluray tech (DVD will be too small next gen, and what other tech would they use?).  Nintendo will stay with disks because they're further behind in online infrastructure and large storage devices would raise their console prices above what they'd want to do.  Sony might just stick with bluray another gen, it seems to be something they'd want to do, and there's still more than enough space.
 
Games keep increasing in size, the downloaded games market is still tiny compared to store-bought disks, bandwidth limits from ISPs...  I don't think we're there just yet.

" It depends on how far off the next gen of consoles is I think.  I'd guess MS will want to go no-optical first because they might not want to license bluray tech (DVD will be too small next gen, and what other tech would they use?).  Nintendo will stay with disks because they're further behind in online infrastructure and large storage devices would raise their console prices above what they'd want to do.  Sony might just stick with bluray another gen, it seems to be something they'd want to do, and there's still more than enough space.  Games keep increasing in size, the downloaded games market is still tiny compared to store-bought disks, bandwidth limits from ISPs...  I don't think we're there just yet. "

Sure, just look at the success of the PSPGO

" @josty81: I'm already running out of hardrive space, I need a second one. I uninstalled like a quarter of my games already just to have enough space. It's like near 4- 8 gigs per game these days. I also don't have a third of my games installed either. There are even gamers on steam with more than 150 games, honestly I wonder what is their storage? Slow 2TB green drives? "

The PSPGo is a great example of how NOT to do it.  But what I'm saying isn't necessarily to move everything online - I'm saying cartridges may come back in the form of flash memory, possibly, at least from nintendo.

" Well there's the cloud storage that you get with Steam, I think that's a viable option. "

The hard drive space and bandwidth of the average consumer simply isn't there yet. Maybe after another generation it can be considered.

Havent bought a single DVD based game on PC since 2004, everything I buy is online either from steam or d2d. the only disks i buy are for the ps3 and i wish i didnt have to do that, ive grown past the stage where having stacks of useless and space consuming game boxes everywhere is cool long ago. 
 
anyway its ok since the only games I buy on PS3 are the exclusives so it doesnt amount to too much crap on my shelves. All multiplatform games I play on PC. 

Well if the media can be downloaded without having to worry about DRM or losing everything I can see this happening.  The only reason why I believe this hasn't happened already is because people are afraid of switching over to something that can be taken away at any moment.  I personally prefer having a physical disc because I don't want to lose things that I paid for just because some person decides to shutdown their servers or because my HDD fried and I had no backup.

If they can somehow implement a Steam-like infrastructure where everything is tied to your account, with freedom to delete, and redownload games (and data saves), as well as play those games offline, then I'm all for it.

Optical drives aren't going away any time soon. I can only fit like 25-30% of my steam library on my laptop at once. I bet Microsoft would love to ditch the optical drives to sell more incredibly expensive pseudo-proprietary hard drives.

i don't think so. i have a slow internet broadband and it sucks having them. it takes a while to download things.

"

want to see my optical drive?

"

I can't stand optical media. CDs were great at the time, and offered substantial benefits over floppies for data storage, but long-term? No. The discs get scratched and fail. I'd much rather have an online storage system. But the problem really is bandwidth. Unless the console has a terabyte drive (no big deal, really, since you can pick one up for $75 these days), storage may be a problem. But how many games do I play at a time? Just two or three. But now I can just pop a disc in and play. Otherwise, I'd have to re-download. Even with 10mbps, that's a lot of data to download (and my shit ISP limits me to 100gb/month). Xbox LIve Arcade's system works great for small games: they know you've bought it, so all you have to do is re-download if you've deleted the game. But with multiple-gigabyte games? It's a problem.
 
As much as I'd love to see optical media go away, I'm not seeing an easy solution. New consoles are still a few years away, though, so maybe there will be a solution. Like, for instance, being able to play a game while it's still streaming down to your console, like how we deal with video. Don't know how that might work, but it would solve some of the waiting problems. The other solution we're seeing is games played on a central server, and we're streamed the video (basically, what OnLive is doing). I'm not a big fan of that, though, even if I can see the advantages.
 
Eventually flash will be cheap enough to use in games. I'd almost prefer that to optical. I'd really prefer no media at all. Physical media is so 20th century.

The future is cloud/ online storage I presume, physical storage units are already under the process of being phased out.

Storage prices would have to plummet before the gaming industry even considers it. MS is in more of a position to do it because they're not tied down by Bluray  and their games being a lot smaller in terms of gigs. 

" Storage prices would have to plummet before the gaming industry even considers it. MS is in more of a position to do it because they're not tied down by Bluray  and their games being a lot smaller in terms of gigs.  "

no discs will live on for a long long time and you a fucking moron if you we are all going digital tomorrow.

" @Radar said:

" Storage prices would have to plummet before the gaming industry even considers it. MS is in more of a position to do it because they're not tied down by Bluray  and their games being a lot smaller in terms of gigs.  "

Like I said earlier, I'm 90% Nintendo would like to drop optical discs as soon as possible "

Yeah in Nintendo's case I think a flash based cart system is a possibility. 
 
In Microsoft's case, digital is right around the corner.

Well, in the sound recording department, I've seen table top CD recorders
being replaced with table top compact flash card recorders.  They do the 
same thing but record over more disk space than a CD can record to & 
are reusable.  Current cost  is about $500.
 
So if something like a CF card can end up holding more data than a 
blu-ray disk & is cheaper to manufacture, then CF cards or "cartridges"
will cycle back into favor for awhile.  I've noticed that it's more of a 
cycle between the mediums, disk & cartridge, than something where
one medium takes over forever from the other.

" @Diamond said:

" It depends on how far off the next gen of consoles is I think.  I'd guess MS will want to go no-optical first because they might not want to license bluray tech (DVD will be too small next gen, and what other tech would they use?).  Nintendo will stay with disks because they're further behind in online infrastructure and large storage devices would raise their console prices above what they'd want to do.  Sony might just stick with bluray another gen, it seems to be something they'd want to do, and there's still more than enough space.  Games keep increasing in size, the downloaded games market is still tiny compared to store-bought disks, bandwidth limits from ISPs...  I don't think we're there just yet. "

Sony can keep the format because some Blu-ray discs I heard has doubled in size or something similar from dual layer. "

" @ThePhantomnaut said:

" @Diamond said:

" It depends on how far off the next gen of consoles is I think.  I'd guess MS will want to go no-optical first because they might not want to license bluray tech (DVD will be too small next gen, and what other tech would they use?).  Nintendo will stay with disks because they're further behind in online infrastructure and large storage devices would raise their console prices above what they'd want to do.  Sony might just stick with bluray another gen, it seems to be something they'd want to do, and there's still more than enough space.  Games keep increasing in size, the downloaded games market is still tiny compared to store-bought disks, bandwidth limits from ISPs...  I don't think we're there just yet. "

Sony can keep the format because some Blu-ray discs I heard has doubled in size or something similar from dual layer. "

blue ray can actually hold a massive amount of data with several layers, and these discs can be read by the PS3. Its something like 140Gb or something insane like that with a 14 layer BD "

" If they can somehow implement a Steam-like infrastructure where everything is tied to your account, with freedom to delete, and redownload games (and data saves), as well as play those games offline, then I'm all for it. "

" People with Steam seem to do OK. "

old video game cartridges were basically flash memory(roms), they got phased out mostly due to being expensive to produce and they didn't hold a ton of storage compared to CD's during sega saturn and playstation era.   I guess you can see a comeback but a bluray disc is still alot cheaper to produce than a 60gb flash memory card or hard drive.   And i'm basically talking about consoles, portable game systems already use some form of flash storage device.
 
Also there is still a ton of people who don't have broadband internet, so asking that market of people to try to play a console that has a games of demand service with no optical media games would be closing the door on a somewhat large userbase.

• The credit / debit card issue is only an issue for buying the game. For actually playing the game you don't need a credit / debit card attached. Also, according to the ESA, the most frequent game buyer is, on average, 39 years old. The average gamer is 35 (Source: ESA). I don't feel like pulling out the maths, but that significantly reduces the significant portion of game buyers that minors make up. 
• The prices for digitally distributed games is a direct result of the stranglehold brick and mortar retailers have. Remember the tantrum retailers had when Sony announced the PSP Go? Retailers profit immensely from used games sales and as sellers of the systems and the still huge chunk of brick and mortar purchases they still have a huge influence over the publishers. Risking their ire would mean less orders, less sales. And you can count on retailers being quite happy about taking in any title for second hand sales. You can take a look at the Apple App Store and see how cutting out the retailers works out for game prices.