The Future Of Console Gaming

From what I have seen with the PS3 and now the Xbox 360 with the new experience gaming on consoles in moving rapidly to software installs of games. Now most the most part this is a good thing, faster load times, better graphics, less pop-in textures etc. The main problem is unlike a PC with your console you cannot just slap in another HD when you need the space, I know you can on PS3 but only a handful.

With more and more games like GTA4, Fallout 3, MGS4, GOW2 being in excess of 6 gigs each, HD installs are not practical on a mass spectrum. On the 360 the largest HDD you can currently buy is the 120GB model. But only on the Elite is this standard, with games continuously taking up more and more disc space this is a problem.

When the next batch of consoles comes out they will need to have a minimum of 250GB up to 500GB. Basically Consoles will need to be treated as Pseudo PC’s. We as gamers will need to be able to install an extra HD on our consoles. Think like this, a Blu-ray disc has a capacity of around 25GB for single layer and 50GB dual layer, right now to the best of my knowledge Sony hasn’t put out a game that takes up all that space. With the next gen I fully expect every last GB to be used, this means that just 10 games will take up 250GB’s on your precious HD.

One option I have read about is that all your games and saved may be stored in servers via LIVE or PS4 online, and you just have digital downloads and treat it like Steam but you still need to have the space. Then if that’s all a success what happens with the gen after that and the one after that? Ever more complex games, Better graphics than we can imagine today, massive games taking up hundreds of Gigs?

In all odds by the 10^th gen of consoles everything will be digital and consoles will sport multiple terabyte HD’s and all you stuff will be stored online. There are a few options I could see being used one is Protein Coated Disc’s, a new type of media storage with a capacity measuring in the Terabytes. The other option i could see as viable would be 3D optical disc's. Both could hold multiple terabytes of data and solve the issue of hardrive space by somehow using them as a hard drive storage companent or just use them to store multiple games on one disc. By 2010 I fully expect to see the next gen of consoles with fully downloaded games on it, though I would still expect to see an option to just read the disc as it is now. Bottom line the future of console gaming in a  mix of Digital distribution and full game installs like we have on PC’s.