Quote Originally Posted by bcorgan19
Quote Originally Posted by dethink
...microdrive-sized HD's as cartridges...
This is what I see. something like a $50-$75 ipod that you plug into your machine
It'll (soon) be smaller than an i-Pod, but that sounds good. Having the games on your own personal HD, sort of like a memory card but with games on it, could fix the "can't move your games" problem, but that assumes people want that even at cost AND (on the consoles/Phantom-type side) that publishers will go along with the idea, seeing how it quite drastically puts the power of transfer into your hands and takes control of individual game purchases away from them.

I think, on the consumer side, that folks will still be able to simply download games or move it much like they do now, via the internet (only that's not likely as piracy concerns are obvious). Handheld machines will have their own storage, or they stream data from a distant server; we understand the device in question is a storage medium for games and settings, instead of a primary hard drive, though once again hard drives will simple become caches, and to fulfil their purpose in the game company's scheme they must be crippled and restricted -

For the content provider, the idea of letting somebody move information off the machine, off the network and hence into a great wilderness where their policies and protections no longer hold sway, an area where folks could mess around with data and alter it with great ease, is a strong enough reason for them to not provide a device that allows users to take data and carry it around (and facilitate hacking). Indeed, I would be quite surprised if any future Phantom-style game console would have any but the most specialized of input/output ports with great restrictions on what they can be used for. All data entering and leaving the console will be encrypted to help this process along; processor and cache will even eventually be completely integrated so at no time is raw game data moving freely along the board's traces, if indeed hardware hacking proves to be fruitful as opposed to simple software piracy (though this is my zaniest conclusion, you can bet it will eventually come to pass).

So, while there are uses for a portable HD, you can bet (an assumption I made all along) that games will not be sold on it, individuals won't often need it unless they're somewhere that networks ain't (and in the future, the far reaches and wastes of the worlds will meet), and companies have a vested interest in keeping people from having this ability. My question is this - given all these facts, who in the mainstream would have a practical use for such a device, let alone use it in conjunction with a crippled client?