HD-Less PS3?

GamesIndustry.biz has the story that, for the time being, Sony is planning on releasing their next generation console without a hard drive bundled into the package. From the article: "However the company has never said that a hard disk would be bundled with the unit at launch, and Chatani's comments this month seem to suggest it's erring toward not including one - and perhaps offering the peripheral optionally in the same way it currently sells Memory Card units separately from PlayStation 2."

Comments

If the memory is big enough

[Enrico Pulatzo]

It shouldn't be too much of a concern, with a requisite "if".

If the memory cards are treated like a hard drive, there will be no problem, I can later swap in a HDD to store more data/access it quicker. If, however, the situation is similar to the one with the Playstation 2 (a hard drive evenutally came out and found little use since developers couldn't really count on one being there) then the PS3 will suffer for it and when a hdd is released, it won't see too much use.

Re:If the memory is big enough

[ZephyrXero]

By not including a harddrive built in, this is the problem they put themselves in. The industry has proven time and time again that if it's a peripheral and not built in or at least bundled it's not going to get used very much in actual games. This was the reasoning behind the dreamcast coming with a built in modem and the xbox coming with a built in ethernet and harddrive. MS seems to be screwing up in this dept too with the option of buying a system w/o a drive. I could see selling a "basic model" with a 10 gig and then let people buy bigger ones as needed, but to release (both Xbox360 and PS3) without one is going to discourage many developers from taking advantage of it. At least the first wave of launch Xbox360's will all have a harddrive included.

The other question is what happened to the harddrive Nintendo damn near guarenteed us would be built into the Revolution? 512MB of flash memory does not sound like a harddrive to me... not unless youre running a 486 system or something :P

I am very happy about the use of "standard" SD Flash cards instead of proprietary memory cards all around... Still, a harddrive should be cheaper than a flash memory card ($75 for a 1GB flash or $75 for an 80GB HD), so I don't even see why they're releasing them....

That's fine.

[HaloZero]

But I want the ability to put my OWN hard drive in there, of my choosing, without having to buy additional equipment (except for said hard drive, of course). Sony's trying chance to sell a 40GB hard disk for the PS2 at a price of 199$ is and was ridiculous. I mean, FFS, I have hard disks just kicking around my room.

Also, will I be able to put savegames on the hard drive? Will I be able to near-seamlessly move them onto a Memory Card?

Price control?

[Snowspinner]

Hm. This seems a bit of an odd move, unless they're dropping it to try to get back below the $400 price point, in which case it makes total sense.

In other words...

[calikahuna]

Holy hell, this thing is gonna cost a lot to make! Cut costs! The downside is the same as for the PS2, if its not standard equipment, developers will assume that the majority don't have it and won't use the features. Tough decision for Sony, but in the long run at least the marketing folks can still say that it has hard drive capability to compete with MS, even if most games will ignore it.

Something fishy...

[kaptron]

I seem to remember hearing that the PS3 is not really a gaming console. They've stripped the HD, the controller is already wireless, like a remote control... Hey, this is looking like a fancy blu-ray DVD player! Well, at least it stands on its side. Killer.

HD/HDD

[goodenoughnickname]

Can we stick to the acronym "HDD" for Hard Disk Drive? I thought this was an article about a non-High Definition PS3 being made. Which, really, is a stupid idea, but so is not bundling an HDD.

Thank you.