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Squilliam on 30 March 2010
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binary solo said:
Squilliam said:

Its not a significant revenue stream and its probably worth more to them to reposition the Arcade as an even more viable hardware SKU because for a reasonable number of people in makes the Arcade viable as a console. In addition to this they'd probably gain more in revenue for their Live services than they would ever lose from some few HDD sales lost. Its effectively a hardware pricecut for the proportion of the market who want some but not much download capabilities.

Perhaps not, but MS seems to like keeping hold of these things by creating proprietary products either with HW designs or middleware restrictions that prevent widespread use of 3rd party products that are capable of exactly the same functionality. Hence their steps to prevent people pulling the supplied HDD out of their proprietary HDD case and replacing it with a bigger one.

It just seems to go against MSs general philosophy of wanting to stay in control of HW to allow for [potentialy] unlimited external HDD memory through anything other than a proprietary MS HDD. For people wanting to get better functionality on their Arcade giving them freedom up to 32Gig is all they need. After that it's consistent with the MS modus operandi to put proprietary controls on their customers. MS and retailers should be able to convince most people to buy one proprietary MS 120 or 250 HDD than multiple 16gig  3rd party devices.

And a profitable revenue stream is a profitable revenue stream. Why hand any profits over to other companies if you can keep them to yourself?

No, the reason is because they want to protect the margin/profitability of their Elite SKU. If anyone could simply add a HDD to an Arcade they wouldn't be able to sell the higher profit Xbox 360 Elites and to allow their loss lead SKU to be more financially viable at a lower price point. However now they are under more pricing pressure they have relented somewhat for the Arcade SKU to allow it to have an external USB drive attached and it also allows them to remove the card readers from the slim SKU and save money on every unit produced. HDD sizes are an area of greatly diminishing returns and there are simply very few people who would want to put a larger than 120GB HDD into their console.



Tease.