I've begun wondering recently if we will end up going full circle and ending up with cartridges again as part of whatever next-gen or next-next-gen gaming consoles, this time based solely on generic flash memory. The cost of flash would have to start going down even more drastically than it already is to ever come close to matching the manufacturing cost of a DVD or even a Blu Ray disk, but I would think there would be a point where the value/$ would make it worth it to the consumer. Faster loading times, more durable games (ie no disk scratch errors), no real space limit on the games, extra room for game specific DLC, and I'm sure other advantages that I can't think of now that would be cool.

Street Fighter 2 super dooper HD remix might only need 5-10 gigs worth of memory, so they just throw in one 16 gig module (or two 8 / four 4 gig modules for data striping and faster loading times) and ship it. Metal Gear Solid 7 and its over 9000 hours of CGI might need 200+ gigs, so they just throw in as much flash memory as they can and go to town with their high res textures and lossless a/v.

Lets say Rock Band 5 ships with 80 songs at approximately a half gig a song, as well as 20 gigs of everything else, for a 60 gig total footprint. They then could ship the game on a 120 gig flash cartridge, mark half of it writable to the console, and boom. Now instead of having to carry around your xbox hard drive when visiting friends for RB parties, you just take the cartridge and it has the DLC on it.