No HDD in Core 360 a "mistake", says dev

[Bodhesatva]

TheRealMafoo said:

Bodhesatva said:

Xbox Live Should be free. The PS3 should cost less. All 360s should come with a hard drive. All games should be tailor made for their systems, so that CoD5 (as an example) takes full advantage of XBL's features on the 360, takes full advantage of the Sixaxis and Blu Ray on the PS3, and full advantage of the Wii Mote on the Wii.

It all sounds fantastic! Except the industry -- at least, the PS3/360 side things -- isn't exactly rolling in money as it is. Sony has bled billions over the last couple of years in this industry, and Microsoft has been bleeding billions since they entered. EA is losing money. Several other major publishers will lose money this year (not Activision, though!) or make slim profits. The last thing these companies want to do is shave earnings even further.

I think the entire industry is suffering a slight case of man-child syndrome: a complete lack of awareness of financial reality and economic responsibility. I want a 1 dollar Refrigerator and a 50 cent Toaster. It's great for everyone! The appliance companies sell more units, and everyone gets cheaper toasters. What could possibly go wrong?

I disagree. No one here is saying MS should have hit a different price point, or added anything they didn't already have. The argument is they should not have released a model with fewer capabilities than their main stream option. Doing so has now made the collective pool weaker, thus tying developer’s hands.

How was this a good thing? It didn't make MS any more money. Almost no one bought the Core or the Arcade (compared to the HD options). The best “spin” you could put on this, is it forced developers to not use HD space for large downloads.

But then again, I have never been one to think that forcing developers to do something due to limited hardware benefits gamers.

Yes, it absolutely did make MS more money. Dropping the hard drive from the Arcade SKU probably shaved 10 dollars off each system. In addition, many Core users later purchased an attachable HD for 100 dollars. Let's be nice, say that only 1/10 core users eventually bought an HD. That means, on average, Microsoft made 18 additional dollars per customer by not including the HD -- and I think that's a very conservative estimate. 

If you don't think shaving 20 dollars off the cost of SKU isn't relevant, your foolish. 

As to the second bolded statement: this is precisely the sort of man-childish statement I was talking about. Yes! Developers shouldn't have to deal with limited hardware. Sony and Microsoft should instead have made much more powerful systems, right? Because all three systems are limited. None are top of the line now. Why didn't they make the systems even more powerful, and build them like supercomputers? Why do the PS3 and 360 only have 512 MB of RAM? (in the case of the PS3, it isn't even unified) We're already seeing games (most notably RTS like Supreme Commander) struggle to run on current-gen platforms, because they don't have enough RAM. Why did they limit the developers so? 

Answer: limiting developers isn't a good thing, inherently. The problem is, people take this concept and run everywhere with it, to the point where they completely ignore economic realities. Because you know what would be even worse for gamers? If all these companies went out of business because we insisted they build ultra-super-computers for us and then forced them to sell those computers for 200 dollars when they cost 10,000 to develop.

It's an extreme example to prove a point. Here's the central question, Mafoo: Microsoft has already spent -- spent, not earned -- over 6 billion dollars in the last decade on gaming. They have spent money to sell us their product! Given that, at what point does it become unreasonable for us, as consumers, to insist that they aren't doing enough, and that they should have spent even more? 

Because at some point, this is going to turn the other way. You realize that, right? At some point in the future, these companies are going to want to turn a net profit on us. This isn't a charity. I think many gamers have just gotten so used to companies that are willing to spend billions of dollars to attract their interest that a company actually making money on them sounds greedy and unfair.