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

[Final-Fan]

TheRealMafoo said:

Bodhesatva said:

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?

I think you are missing my point. I have said nothing about cost. My argument has nothing to do with revenue. I think if MS had charged everyone more money for a 360, and then put a HD in every one of them (even if it was a 6 gig on the “core”) it would have been a smarter move. I am not asking MS to spend more, or provide us with more capability.

My argument is when you take any component that’s vital to the development of a game (Hard Drive, Video Card, Ram, CPU, etc...) and then limit one of those core items on any console you sell, you reduce the value of that component in the ones that have it.

For example, if in some 360’s at launch, MS sold units with 1 gig of ram, but then told developers that there games had to run on all consoles, you just greatly reduced the usefulness of that extra 512 Meg. Same thing is true with adding/removing a hard drive.

Adding something like wireless, or an HDMI port later on is no big deal, it does not affect the development of games, but having or not having a hard drive is a different thing if you ask me.

I agree with this. Also, Bodhesatva, in another post you talked about people with the Core buying the ridiculously expensive HDD separately and recouping the expense for MS. First off, I think that literally tricking your customers into having to spend more money is a fucking reprehensible move. Moreover, if not for the Trojan Horse effect of the $300 price tag, having the Core doesn't even make sense! The Core cost $300 and came with a wired controller and no HDD (HDD sold separately for $100, memory card sold separately for (IIRC) $40). The Premium cost $400 and came with a wireless controller and an HDD. MS made no extra profit on people who bought a Core and an HDD over people who bought a Premium and in fact is out whatever it cost MS to make a different type of controller and color scheme, packaging, shipping two models to retail, shipping HDDs separately for retail, etc.

And then there are the people they tricked into thinking they could get a decent console when in fact they could never have [edit: much] XBL downloadable content, etc. (e.g. anything XBLA) without (effectively) buying up to the more expensive model. Boom, that's one of the 360's defining attributes, unattainable to the poor fool who bought a Core and a memory card.

[edit2:  There is obviously more than a little anger in this post, but rest assured that none of it is aimed at you, Bod.]