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Intrinsic on 21 October 2014
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cpg716 said:
I could see both Sony and Microsoft offering DIGITAL only consoles (without Blu-Ray) at some point.. Maybe for late 2016.. I do think it will be offered along side ones with Blu-Ray though.. Maybe $50 less for the digital only.. So in 2016.. we could see two versions (3 for Xbox One) of each console.. PS4 Slim $299, PS4 Blu-Ray $349.. X1 Slim $279 X1 Blu-Ray $329 and X1 w/kinect $399...

Also.. NO ONE would ever announce a NEW console version at E3 and then release it AFTER the holidays.. That would kill sales for the holidays for people waiting for the update..

Not only is this just impossible, its also impractical. Things to consider are this.

  1. It cost more money than you may think having two or more SKUs in circulation in the market. Even if the differences are hardrive sizes. Not to mention the differences being that one has a disc drive and the other doesn't
  2. To justify the production of a discles version of any console, then there must be data backing it that more people are buying digital than there are buying a disc. If a disc copy of a game sells 5M copies, then the digital version of the same game sells 1M copies, making a digital console means that you are building to address ~20% of the market. Thats not worth the extra investment, Especially when every console with a discdrive could just as easily pass for a digital only console too.
  3. You are not going to be saving as much money as you may think. The 500GB HDD in the PS4 costs sony $23 ($0.046/GB). The Blu-ray drive costs $25. If you take out the Blu-ray drie and go all digital you will  need to compensate with a bigger HDD. So ssay you put in a 1TB HDD in there that will come up to around $46. All you are saving is $2. Maybe $3 if you consider that there will be one less step in the manufacturing process. So removing the HDD will not afford you the luxury of dropping your price by $50. Even if you don't double the HDD size.
We will never see a discless console this gen. Now will we see them putting an SSD in the console. When they strart putting Nand flash storage in conoles (SSDs), then having the storage be in a casing and connected via convential SATA interfaces would become redundant. It would be cheaper for them to just embed the storage modules directly on the board and use a proprietary data IO to achieve speeds far greater than a standard straight forward connection. And that is what is most likely going to happen with the PS5/XB2.