Console business must expand worldwide on the much higher scale than now. Thus, emerging markets like Eastern Europe, ex-Soviet countries, Middle East, India, China and South America will come into commercial focus in years to come.
At this point, all those countries has rosen around 100% growth of their GDP in last few years, but of course - there is great road that all of them have to make in catching up the developed world in terms of incomes as they're now - and will not happpen so fast. However, I'll take my cuntry as a example - Croatia - where GDP has risen around 100% in last 6 years or so.
And here is the point of all above: digital distribution will have to wait significantly. The internet penetration in above markets is nowhere near the one in developed world, even in the countries with higher standard, as mine. And internet speed is also significant factor which will not catch up the standards for next-next-gen content size in those markets. MY personal example is that standard internet connection in Croatia is aorund 4Mb/512kb, while I'm very lucky with my FTTH optics in 2Mb/2Mb range which will become 5Mb/5Mb in few days. But, I'm in the 0,01% people who have access to such speeds.
And you can't be foolish to think that all players - especially MS and Sony - do not take those markets in their equations.
Next-next-gen optical drives confirmed, but with stronger emphasis on digital download.
Oh yeah, another "small" detail - games already have more than 30GB of data. With being certain that next-next-gen will be able to pull-off 1080p with no problem as a standard, I guess we can expect next-next-gen games to be in proximity of 60-80GB of data-size, without going into futher explanations. Downloading such a tramendous amount of data - with internet speeds in range of even unbeleivable 40Mb/s would take very serious amounts of time.
No way hose, at least not in next few years.