Like CDs and DVDs, the discs can't rotate too fast or they... yeah, explode into a crapload of small pieces as the centrifugal(?) forces becomes too great for the material to hold together.

Actually, it does.

Games are usually packed between 5GB and 12GB at the moment other than a few exceptions like Empire:TW. We are a long way from needing BD for storage.

awesome.
but i am pretty sure there are ways to speed up the reading process without actually speeding up the rotation.

Back in the days of CD-ROMs there was a 72x drive (if my mind doesn't play games with me), using several lasers instead of a too-high speed.

My C.D. broke up like that a few years ago, it must of had a fault. The drive made weird sounds I went down to open it, and just as I did bits of C.D. flew out and scraped my arm.

It has to do with transfer speeds. I would think in the future everything will be a digital download but that won't stop that 50gb game from taking 3 or 4 hours to install. Excluding the download portion. Personally I would rather be playing a game then watching it install on my PC.
Eventually they will hit a wall as to the speed and storage capacity of a harddrive. Maybe an alternative could be some type of solid state memory but they need to work out memory degradation and corruption. Also to add to the problem solid state costs alot to produce where as DVD/Blurays are cheap and disposable.
I think that Empire Total War game took an hour to install if I remember right.

are you serious?
rather playing a game than watching.....
dude. why are you even here? go play on a console. since the dawn of human kind (aka 90s) games took time to install. five-ten minutes. sometimes only few. now it takes over ten and it is alright.
and wall? what wall? new technologies are being invented all the time. old technologies get cheaper...
10 years ago my friend got brand new 20 GB harddrive. it was massive, slow and expensive.
now...ptf. i wouldn't even notice if i suddenly lost 20GB from my hdd (unless it was from 2 partitions which are almost full with 11 and 15 GB free each)
10 Terabytes install won't matter. heck. if we gonna use bytes as system of measuring the size of the digital data (and i don't see it changing) then in thirty years "games" or whatever will be surely taking hundreds of terabytes per install or something.
and you will download 100MB picture in under a second :D
my first hdd was 500MB. at the time it was massive (good ol' 94)
then i had 2gb
afterwards 120GB
now 1T
and i am thinking about adding one more 1T drive. dirt cheap.
you are really panicking dreadcog. without any real reason.

That's cool man, if you enjoy watching games install. I'm here to play games.
My experience with technology is that all they know how to do is piggyback or cannibalize what came out before. Blurays are just CDs. Larger harddrives just have better data compression. Fast NEW processors are just processors inside of processors.
There's only so many times you can reinvent the wheel.

Kids today... so impatient! :)
Back in my day we had to wait for our computers to do stuff all the time, and we damn well liked it!
But yeah, storage space is increasing faster than transfer speeds, so I get your point.
Now get off my lawn!

Like be invented?

HOW OLD DO YOU THINK I AM!?
Waiting for the vacuum tubes to warm up, if you must know.

I asked you that same question already! ;)

*In a falsetto voice* A gentleman never asks a lady her age!