Next Xbox; If not blu-ray, Then what?

[rembrandtqeinstein]

Probably blu ray, but if someone crazy gets the reigns again it will be cartridges with both ram and rom storage. The game body would be in the rom, and updates, dlc etc would go on the ram.

That way game updates would be stored on the cartridge itself and people could play the same game at their friend's house without having to download updates.

Also that would eliminate the direct copying piracy that is going on now. Say what you want about microsoft but they have the only uncracked system.

 

[philcelery]

Also that would eliminate the direct copying piracy that is going on now. Say what you want about microsoft but they have the only uncracked system.

What system is that, the Zune?

 

[Amondren]

VHS of coarse because humanity is incapable of putting discs back in their cases and lose them.

 

[valkeminator]

Dont ow

Either way, Im more in favor of Hard Drive Direct Downloads.

thats a terrible idea, think of how much they will charge for that crap.

as it is, the xbox's on demand feature is already really bad at pricing.

Don't own a 360 and therefore haven't touched the price market for 360, but from what I heard it is very pricey... Still its a lot better than buying BluRays though.

At least theyre unlikely to use Blu Ray as I think its made by Sony?

 

[BloodSquirrel]

And such an operation would, presumably, be more costly than a 24/7 flash memory producing studio. Plus licensing fees.

Looking around, I can't find flash memory going for under $1/GB. A "flash memory producing stuido" would be more along the lines of a fabrication plant, which are FAR more expensive than an optical media printing press.

Also, I'm talking about the same kind of reader that currently exists on cameras/laptops with a different pin configuration or something. That would be trivial to develop. USB is designed as a universal format for connecting arbitrary devices to a PC/console, not as an actual drive interface, which makes it less than ideal for your systems primary drive.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

There are currently 32GB SDHC cards out there which beats a 25GB single layer BD. Dual layer obviously holds 50Gb, but with flash memory becoming much more accessible, I don't see why the Xbox won't have Flash memory with Digital Distribution, plus a CD/DVD drive for the movie goers.

EDIT: Also found this info:
The Secure Digital Extended Capacity (SDXC) format was unveiled at CES 2009 (January 7?10, 2009). The maximum capacity defined for SDXC cards is 2 TB (2048 GB). The SDcard association selected Microsoft's proprietary exFAT file system in the official SDXC specification.

Proprietary Microsoft memory the size of an SD card that can hold 2TB? This HAS to be the way of physical distribution for Xbox. If not, then I don't know what they are thinking.

How much would a 2 TB SD Card cost? O_O

I feel it would be really unstable too... God knows my 32 GB card likes to just lose files here and there... Though that might be my device not sure.

SDXC is a standard format, not an actual technology. They don't have actual 2TB cards in the works, but new SD cards will use the SDXC format, which uses addressing that can access up to 2TB.

 

[Funkysandwich]

There is no way Sony will let Microsoft use their technology.

Sony does own the rights to Blu-ray, right?

They're a backer in the consortium behind it. They're also in the same position with DVD's, and Microsoft uses that...

But they won't ever get their hands on Blu-ray, I bet.

Well, until it dies along with all other physical media, lol.

Companies rarely turn down more money. They'll sell the rights to microsoft.

But that would be suicide for the Sony consoles. What else do they have left as an edge over them? Microsoft has so much going for it this generation, for Sony to just hand over the one thing they have in advantage - disc space and arguably better graphics - just wouldn't be worth it.

Unless Sony just forgets the whole console thing.

This is speculation about the next Xbox, therefore it is unfair to compare the PS3 to the not-yet-announced next xbox. No doubt Sony will play a cautious wait-and-see game with the next console generation.

The problem is that Microsoft can afford to throw money at something until it succeeds, kind of like how they got the first xbox off the ground, and how they were able to popularize the 360 despite the RROD issues.

 

[epikAXE]

Isn't it obvious? they're going with HD DVD next...<.<

thats blu ray...

 

[Da Orky Man]

Isn't it obvious? they're going with HD DVD next...<.<

thats blu ray...

No, it isn't. Look them up on Wikipedia. They already made a HD DVD addon for the 360.

 

[Wicky_42]

The cost of a disk is near $30 to produce, flash drives are commercially sold for less than that. On top of that, a blu ray disc drive costs however much it costs, a USB (or similar) drive costs (probably) less than $10 to produce. There's also the issues associated with lost/damaged discs, faulty lasers (and hence expensive repairs) and so on (especially weak compared to digital distribution).

Honestly, I just don't see why any company without a vested interest in the technology would push blu ray.

No. http://www.amazon.co.uk/TDK-BD-R-50GB-Blu-ray-T78009/dp/B0018RIKQ0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305729293&sr=8-1
I can buy 4 50GB recordable blu-ray disks right now commercially for £12.35 - that's 0.06175p per GB, and those aren't even the stamped, un-recordable disks the industry would use which are going to be a fraction of that price.

USB Flash memory comes in at around £1 per GB, scaling pretty evenly up to 32GB then getting more expensive.

That's 16x as expensive if you were doing it from home, let alone the massive savings the industry will get on disks which won't be available in anything like the strength on flash memory.

One day though - one day cartridges will return!

 

[Wicky_42]

I'm going to assume the next xbox won't have blu-ray..it probably won't...They're even trying to squeeze out a last drop of life with
the incoming May firmware update that gives a 15 percent-ish boost to disc space for their games.

If not blu, What are they planning on doing? Maybe trying to make their own new format just for the new console? Staying with DVDs even? Thoughts?

That's impossible, unless you're describing some sort of new format for save files on the hard drive, physically increasing the size of a compact disc is not possible by any means, let alone a mere firmware update, the only way to increase game space on a disc, is to do some sort of dual layering (eg. 4.7GB single layer DVD = 9.4GB dual layer DVD), which only fixes future discs, or to upgrade formats to Blu-Ray, which would be far too expensive - even if they released an external Blu-ray drive (like thier HD DVD from my understanding), people would be loathed to buy a new add-on just to be able to read certain types of games.

IIRC it's an update to make use of space on the disk that was previously reserved for some other function, rather than magicking up more space, adding more layers or some sort of peripheral.

 

[gorfias]

100% DLC to proprietairy hard drive.

Add to that online streaming coop games.

I'll hate it.

 

[googleback]

They could just develop a standalone disc format. and give the drive blu ray (possibly) and dvd functionality.

I personally think they're going to wait a little while until digital distribution is more used then just release a discless console. or at least one with a massive hard drive and a better online store.

 

[Super Toast]

Orange-Ray. The logical conclusion. (Somehow)

 

[Nate Corran]

Blu-ray. Though with the board of directors such strong competitors against Microsoft in so much, its gonna hike the price plenty

 

[Dys]

The cost of a disk is near $30 to produce, flash drives are commercially sold for less than that. On top of that, a blu ray disc drive costs however much it costs, a USB (or similar) drive costs (probably) less than $10 to produce. There's also the issues associated with lost/damaged discs, faulty lasers (and hence expensive repairs) and so on (especially weak compared to digital distribution).

Honestly, I just don't see why any company without a vested interest in the technology would push blu ray.

No. http://www.amazon.co.uk/TDK-BD-R-50GB-Blu-ray-T78009/dp/B0018RIKQ0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305729293&sr=8-1
I can buy 4 50GB recordable blu-ray disks right now commercially for £12.35 - that's 0.06175p per GB, and those aren't even the stamped, un-recordable disks the industry would use which are going to be a fraction of that price.

USB Flash memory comes in at around £1 per GB, scaling pretty evenly up to 32GB then getting more expensive.

That's 16x as expensive if you were doing it from home, let alone the massive savings the industry will get on disks which won't be available in anything like the strength on flash memory.

One day though - one day cartridges will return!

My intial assumptions as to what a blu ray disc costs to produce were considerably higher than they actually are, even so the cost of flash memory is getting crazy cheap. Things like licensing (reportedly $8000 per film/game to have unlimited 'prints' of it, admittedly from a less than reliable source) drives the cost of using the medium up. Flash memory shouldn't be even remotely near £1 per GB, if they can manage to sellSD cards like this then I can't see the cost of production for other forms of flash memory to be especially high.

And such an operation would, presumably, be more costly than a 24/7 flash memory producing studio. Plus licensing fees.

Looking around, I can't find flash memory going for under $1/GB. A "flash memory producing stuido" would be more along the lines of a fabrication plant, which are FAR more expensive than an optical media printing press.

Also, I'm talking about the same kind of reader that currently exists on cameras/laptops with a different pin configuration or something. That would be trivial to develop. USB is designed as a universal format for connecting arbitrary devices to a PC/console, not as an actual drive interface, which makes it less than ideal for your systems primary drive.

I don't see too many companys selling flash memory at less than a dollar per GB, but I also don't see any reason for distributer to sell for less than what the market is happy to pay (which is notably more). I know the whole story with NAND not dropping price as predicted and there not being a huge drop in production costs and all of the justification for why it's so expensive at the consumer level, but I just struggle to accept that such a new technology, that is (at least in my eyes) yet unproven to be cheaper. I see no reason why those few games that do not fit on a DVD disc to combine a DVD disc with game content stored on a portable hdd or some form of flash media.

Look, ultimately I could be completely wrong about the costs, but I'm still somewhat doubtful about blu ray discs being the most economically viable choice. There's still the competition from digital distribution and simply storing games on hard disc and, quite frankly, I wouldn't expect microsoft to adopt bluray if their next best alternative was posting individual lines of code.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

I don't see too many companys selling flash memory at less than a dollar per GB, but I also don't see any reason for distributer to sell for less than what the market is happy to pay (which is notably more).

That only works in a monopoly, or in an oligopoly with price fixing behind the scenes. The flash market is pretty competitive right now, especially with the number of players trying to get in on the ground floor of the SSD market.

Look, ultimately I could be completely wrong about the costs, but I'm still somewhat doubtful about blu ray discs being the most economically viable choice. There's still the competition from digital distribution and simply storing games on hard disc and, quite frankly, I wouldn't expect microsoft to adopt bluray if their next best alternative was posting individual lines of code.

Even if MS can sell flash cards for ½ the price they?re currently going for, that?s still $16 for a 32 GB disc.

To put digital distribution into perspective- with current Canadian bandwidth caps, it is cheaper to transfer data by buying hard drives, writing the data, and mailing them across the country.

So far, blu-ray is by far the most economical solution that has been presented. The only other option I see is if MS can find some cheaper kind of ROM than flash lying around (since their cards only need to be written to once, something that flash can?t get away with).

Flash memory shouldn't be even remotely near £1 per GB, if they can manage to sellSD cards like this then I can't see the cost of production for other forms of flash memory to be especially high.

Huh? That's an 8 GB card for $13. That's almost $2 per GB. And it's on Ebay.

 

[Nomanslander]

There is no way Sony will let Microsoft use their technology.

Sony does own the rights to Blu-ray, right?

Not entirely, there's a lot of companies that have spares so....there you go.

=/

Oh and wouldn't it be funny if they just continue with what they're using now. I can see it now. Gears of War 4 will be on 4 disc, Red Dead Redemption 2 on 10, FF15 on 15, and LA Noir 2 on 20...lol

 

[fgdfgdgd]

There is no way Sony will let Microsoft use their technology.

Sony does own the rights to Blu-ray, right?

I do believe the one that made the first BDD was Toshiba and they supplied most of the parts for the PS3, so I doubt they're in the business of not making millions of dollars from Microsoft.

OT:More than likely Digital Distribution.

On a side note, Remember the format war? When everyone was bitching and saying that HD-DVD was going to win because it was cheaper? Yeah, that was fun.

 

[willsham45]

Green ray...exactly the same as blue ray but green