| Onibaka said: Sony would have a big loss selling PS3 at $200.....initially. If Sony can convince the consumers to buy a overpriced HDD, there is a chance of even being able to profit. Also the faster BD drive probably will not add to costs that much. I think that Sony only manufactures the slow ones to maintain all SKUs equal. Games would be patched to not require HDD install. Also giving the Plus! for 1 or 2 months would be a incentive to buy the HDD. 4GB is almost nothing. Those HDDs would cost like $30 to make and they could sell for $100 or more.
But yeah, making patches could be impractical. Maybe it's too late. |
I think it is still too late. First of all, older games don't benefit much, if at all, from faster BD drive. Games are designed for slower BD drive and reading BD faster could break the game. With older games, new BD drive would have to work just as slow as old BD drive, otherwise old games may not work properly.
Patching games so they would not require HDD isn't easy or cheap. For some games, patch would be huge and sometimes even bigger than the actual HDD install. And that patch would, of course, require HDD. That would mean that most games would never be patched for non-HDD SKU. You have to remember that even with faster BD drive, HDD is still much faster than BD. Even the fastest BD drives in the world are slower than even a slow HDD (especially seek times, where even slow HDD is over 20 times faster than fast BD).
