I've begun wondering recently if we will end up going full circle and ending up with cartridges again as part of whatever next-gen or next-next-gen gaming consoles, this time based solely on generic flash memory. The cost of flash would have to start going down even more drastically than it already is to ever come close to matching the manufacturing cost of a DVD or even a Blu Ray disk, but I would think there would be a point where the value/$ would make it worth it to the consumer. Faster loading times, more durable games (ie no disk scratch errors), no real space limit on the games, extra room for game specific DLC, and I'm sure other advantages that I can't think of now that would be cool.

Street Fighter 2 super dooper HD remix might only need 5-10 gigs worth of memory, so they just throw in one 16 gig module (or two 8 / four 4 gig modules for data striping and faster loading times) and ship it. Metal Gear Solid 7 and its over 9000 hours of CGI might need 200+ gigs, so they just throw in as much flash memory as they can and go to town with their high res textures and lossless a/v.

Lets say Rock Band 5 ships with 80 songs at approximately a half gig a song, as well as 20 gigs of everything else, for a 60 gig total footprint. They then could ship the game on a 120 gig flash cartridge, mark half of it writable to the console, and boom. Now instead of having to carry around your xbox hard drive when visiting friends for RB parties, you just take the cartridge and it has the DLC on it.

I think prices for flash are just now getting to the point where it's entirely feasible to distribute most software on them.

I doubt it. A bought a 16GB SD card a little while back, and it cost maybe $30. A Blu-ray disc holds 25GB single-sided, and 50GB double-sided, and probably costs well less than a dollar to press.

Flash is a loooooong way from beating the disc.

Just checked at Amazon.de, the price for a writable blu-ray disk seems to start from 5€, for a 25GB disc. 16GB USB sticks were around 23€. It does not seem that far away?

Also, I suppose Blu-Ray will be stuck at it's size because of the norms and patent hell, whereas sticks can just continue to grow. Flash drives are becoming popular, so the price of Flash in general might come down.

But as a content producer you're not burning stuff onto writable Blu-rays. You're pressing them in a factory at a cost well less than $1 a disc.

Whereas a USB stick, even bought in large volumes, can only be so cheap.

You don't care if memory sticks can grow - you have, say, 20GB of content you want to deliver to your customer. It's just extra cost if you buy a 40GB memory stick to carry it.

I just don't see any incentive (other than marketing/coolness) for distributing anything on a USB stick.

You are correct but you are looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Who cares about reprogramming your stick: for blu-ray, you want to buy a movie. The movie studio is the one wanting to make a profit, so most of the sale price of the movie should not go into the media.

Therefore, mass producing blu-ray movies, at around $1 (or less) per disc is very effective (the studios will sell you the movie at $9.99 or more).

When will a USB stick for 20GB cost less than $1? It's still quite far off.

The assumption, of course, is that you will have 20+gb of content on a Blu-Ray disc. I am not convinced this is often the case, and an independent could produce these slightly-higher-cost items for distribution and put all sorts of material on them.

By sided, you mean layered, right? I thought blu-rays could have multiple layers that you could see by doing different things to the laser involved.

You've lit a fire under me, Tichy. Thank you.

I don't know if it would be cheaper or not, but since they don't need to be written to they could just use read-only solid state memory instead. I think it could easily more durable and convenient and I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet.

Without major changes to optical media (like the holographic stuff we've been hearing about for decades), I'm sure the lowering price of flash media will slowly kill optical.

not to mention writable (think of movies/series that can save where you left off and pick up from there).

This is why blu-ray players include writable storage.