With the Xbox 720, a Return to Game Cartridges?

[supaflyx3]

That's going to get expensive..

[JJThomp]

Originally Posted by supaflyx3

That's going to get expensive..

Not really, when you think about how much a flash drive costs. Thinking about how much an SSD costs it could be expensive but I doubt they are going to go high end solid state storage.

[MacJunky]

Think about how much MS charges even for HDDs now.
This stuff is not getting cheaper.

[Silent_Avenger]

Yay no more scratched disks and damaged lasers because of some idiot friend.

[Peroxide]

Originally Posted by JJThomp

Not really, when you think about how much a flash drive costs. Thinking about how much an SSD costs it could be expensive but I doubt they are going to go high end solid state storage.

You can say that with a straight face?

They charge $120 for a 250gb SATA HDD and I believe the MSRP for the 120gb was $150 when it was first released. You're still paying $1/gb even for used OCZ Vertex or Intel X25-V.

The only thing I agree with is them not going with high end SSDs. :p

[JJThomp]

Originally Posted by Peroxide

You can say that with a straight face?

They charge $120 for a 250gb SATA HDD and I believe the MSRP for the 120gb was $150 when it was first released. You're still paying $1/gb even for used OCZ Vertex or Intel X25-V.

The only thing I agree with is them not going with high end SSDs. :p

What I'm saying is, is that it doesn't need to be a vertex, I highly doubt that they will use a SATA interface at all, USB 3.0 or something custom is much more likely. And those drives can be found for as low as 50-60c per GB.

Also the games aren't going to be huge and there won't be a need to write on the cartridge so a 20 gb game will likely be on a 20gb (maybe slightly larger) drive. So at $12 per cartridge I'm thinking it probably won't be much more expensive than HDDVD.

Originally Posted by Silent_Avenger

Yay no more scratched disks and damaged lasers because of some idiot friend.

It will be back to damaged/scratched pins and trying to blow the dust out of them though lol

[frontier204]

I was thinking more like an SD card or even like the xD card (which doesn't have a controller). I wonder how big they'll be - if they're the size of CompactFlash cards or smaller, then the "dumb friend" issue will be more like getting it lost in some random nook and then sucked up by the vacuum cleaner

[enaberif]

Even SD card in the 32gb or 64gb size that would be fast enough is STILL more expensive than a typical game.

[Silent_Avenger]

Originally Posted by JJThomp

It will be back to damaged/scratched pins and trying to blow the dust out of them though lol

I was more or less referring to a friend who decided to move someones 360 while the game disc was spinning inside during a lan party. Never had any issues with damaged/scratched pins or dust with my 360's 512mb memory card or my SD card for my camera and a routinely use both of them.

As for the size they'll probably make them the size of current 360 memory cards but I wouldn't doubt some big shot would throw out there; "Hey you know what, lets make these things really small so that they're easy to lose and people would have to rebuy the game."

Originally Posted by enaberif

Even SD card in the 32gb or 64gb size that would be fast enough is STILL more expensive than a typical game.

Yea but don't forget that's with all the markups and what not from retailers I'm sure in a couple years they'll be super cheap wasn't that long ago that the 32GB cards were $140+

[MacJunky]

I want to doubt that it will be straight storage. For some reason I think there is going to be extra smarts(in addition to custom connector) that talks with the console and tells it that it is not pirated and stuff.

Yes, it would be cracked but trying to crack then emulate that would be more difficult, time consuming, and expensive than, say, a bare SD card.