I generally prefer physical media over digital distribution because I've never been able to get over the need to have something I can hold in my hand when I spend money. But supporting physical media by gouging customers on memory cards is... well it sounds exactly like the sort of thing Sony would do. Over the past few years, Sony has gotten worse and worse with how they treat their customers so I can't be too surprised that they'd decide to limit the system to an overpriced proprietary format. I'd be pissed, but I swore off buying Sony products a few years back and I see no reason to change that position any time soon.

Story can be important to games, but I'm not sure that anybody has figured out exactly how to do it. Deterrent makes a good point about how games shouldn't be passive and often story in games means stopping the action and showing a cutscene. I enjoy cutscenes when they're done well, but there's got to be a way to do it without making the player passive. Some devs tried to solve this with qte's which is a horrible idea (a prompt for me to press a specific button isn't interactivity). The author makes some good points: often the story of the game is told by the environment and by the actions you perform as a player, so perhaps there's potential to expand that. My wishlist for a story based game: I should be moved by the story and should care about what happens to the characters (FFVII did a really good job of this). I should always feel like I'm in control. That would mean no cutscenes, no indestructible characters/contrivances that prevent me from shooting a plot-centric character (Deus Ex 2's leave your weapons outside when entering a facility rule that keeps you from shooting important people). I should feel like my actions actually have an impact on how the story unfolds. (Heavy Rain did pretty well, but never gave me that "in control" feeling). The problem is that a game has to be programmed for every possibility and once you let gamers take control, there are a LOT of possibilities, and sometimes it can be difficult to show the player what's going on without a cutscene.