Well, I don't have roving magnets in my household nor did I ever store my floppies next to a microwave ...

It's amazing how far gaming has come in such a short period. The latest game in the Prince of Persia series, The Forgotten Sands, is due out next month and looks like this (kudos to Urb4nZ0mb13 for this sneak peek screenshot).
Good Times.

More like "Ran out of Sands", amirite?

I've still got the old floppy disks in my collection. Including those 5.25 inch boot disks used to play the 3.5 inch disk games and also games on 5.25 disks themselves. ;)

don't coopy that floopy!

I've still got my Zipdrive. Did someone say the floppy is dying out? I think it died when the writable CD drive came out.
To me DVD/CDs are the outdated format since I imaged them all to a external 2tb drive. Nothing fancy, just a Hitachi drive and a Acomdata case. It works great. It's really nice not having to look through CDs anymore just to find one thing.

yeah... cds are dead. DVD... probably too (not yet i would say. two years). with cheap usb stick twice the size, with external HDD it is just so easy to manage stuff.
we just need blurays to be common. 60 bucks for BL-writer and a buck or less for 50GB disc. then dvd will die and we will be back to disc storage.

Yep, but if games get to the point of being 50 gigs to install I'm not gonna buy new games anymore. I'll stick to the oldies and risk being an un-hip nerd.

I only endured that crap for a brief glimpse of Rage.
And LOL at DP.

Also Klingons.
Because... um... because... I got nothin'.

Why? what's the problem with 50GB installs? what's the problem with 50 terabytes installs?
none. installs grow so does hdd capacity. currently you can get 500GB drives cheaper than a new game here in australia (80 bucks for drive and 100 for a game)
a bit of a pain to download tough.

Transfer speed would probably become an issue for some. According to specification, a 2x speed blueray disc has a transfer rate of 72mbps or 9,5mb/s. Installing a 50gb at that constant rate would take about 90 minutes.
There are plans to raise the speed up to 8x. which would lead to a transfer rate of up to 288Mbps/36mb/s. It would still take almost 24 minutes at that constant rate, though.

Blueray has a maximum rotation speed of about 10,000 RPM, which brings us a 12x speed, which should make it possible for transfer rates of up to 400mbps/50mb/s. Which brings the 50gb install down to about 17 minutes. That's not too bad, as some games do take that much time install. Some probably take even longer.
Hard drive size is not an issue, though, I agree on that, as I have over 3tb myself.

I have 2x500GB in the laptop, 1x500GB USB to take around, and 2x1TB USB to stand under the desk looking smug.
And it's all damn near filled up.