Kutaragi predicts that consumers will embrace digital downloads within one to two years. Eventually, he believes, optical drives will be obsolete, and later all disk storage. "I expect even the hard disk to disappear eventually," notes Kutaragi. "If you have all the data on servers, you probably no longer need disk drives ... but to do this, the server is crucial. It's a difficult problem."
OMG he's copying Bill Gates. Bill said the exact same thing a year ago. He said that HD-DVD/Blu-ray are going to be the last formats and then everything else will be harddrive based. Everyone though he was crazy and was making excuses about HD-DVD not being in the xbox 360. Well know who seems crazy, Microsoft already provides full arcade games, HD trailers and game demos over xbox live and onto our harddrives. Just wait a few years for our Internet connections to get better and harddrive cost go down and we will no longer need physical formats. Imagine a 1or 2 Terabyte on xbox 3 and all games fly to our systems via a 50Megabit internet connection and within an hour we have a whole game on our harddrive, we also save about $20 since we no longer have to pay for the middleman (ie bestbuy), we don't have to pay for shipping of game, manufactor of disc or even the game cases. This is how the future will be.
Well I believe he just undermines his own thoughts for the BetaBluRay drive.
It's not nescessary at this moment as games easily fit on a DL DVD, and with HDMI capped on less then 720p, there's no need for a larger capacity drive. It only cost you money and then in a few years it will be replaced by streaming and downloading content directly on a large HDD on your console and in the next gen consoles over 5 years or so maybe directly from servers without an own HDD.
THis man is great. He just give everyone the reason why not to buy a PS3 with an expensive BetaBluRay which won't be used this gen consoles and will be outdated the next gen over 5 years. What a clown
Shotty.. You're right Bill Gates did say that. I also want to know then why I have to continue hearing about blu ray if this is going to be the case. Let me not say to much before people think I'm bashing. But Ken is a trip.
I don't think it is going to happen for the sole reason of once one person downloads it to his console, what is to stop him (if it is all on the hard drive) from just giving it to his friends, and so then you have a massive amount of piracy of video games. so the only way to stop this is to have it all in local memory, and not on the Hdd, that means you are talking about having to have multi-gig local memory and ram, and that is expensive. plus these are volital memory locations and so when you turn your console off, you lose the data, and would have to redownload it (even if they left a purchase certificate on the hdd so you wouldn't have to pay again) so you are looking at every morning having to wake up and turn on your console for 2 hours before you can play a game. cool idea, but i don't see this as realistic
Digital distribution is going to happen. The question is when not if.
Kutagari-san needs to stop making public statements already. It just seems that his foot is surgically implanted in his mouth lately. So far, based solely on Ken's good words the PS3 is going to be a next-generation DVD player/media center/computer with an upgradable (ie - outdatable) architecture adn an optical drive that will be irrelevant within 2 years of purchase. Man, that sounds hot. Where can I sign up to overpay for something like THAT?!?!?!?