However, I finally did realize a good gamer’s justification of the two systems: cheaper LAN parties. I wouldn’t do this, but I’m sure there are going to be people setting up Halo 3 networks int their house or dorm, and now they can have cheaper nodes.

Or, if I get another system with a DVD drive that dies immediately after the warranty expires, this time I can just get a replacement system without all the extra crap, and use my old hard drive with no fuming or fussing about lost KOTOR saves…

Audio is compressed to about 8 times smaller than on Xbox using XMA, and we have 8 times as much memory to play with so we have room to load levels into memory in the background, instead of onto the hard disk. So, from a gameplay point of view, not being able to rely on a hard drive is a loss… but not a big one, in fact, it just means we can’t be lazy.

The purpose of the hard drive is mainly to enable those who want a media centre, online, multi-download, music playing BEAST (ie. probably everybody reading this page) to have one. But if you just want to dabble in this strange thing called “gaming” you hard your nephew talking about, do you really need all that? I’d contend not. Sure – it’s hard to understand why anyone would buy the “core” system at launch. Give it a year, with the core system half the price (without a hard drive it gets cheaper quicker) and it’d look more like a bargain.

The expansion pack could have a copy of the game on it, maybe with all the maps available for loading…

The game could ask the user to put the expansion pack DVD into the drive when it needed to load a new map…

Admittedly, having the disk is more convenient than these scenarios, but the point is that the disk is not a *requirement*.

Lots of PS2 titles stream *all* game assets, not just audio off of the DVD while you play (God of War does this). Again, my point was not that no games used the hard disk in this way, just that games that use the disk like this seem to me to be very rare.

I know for a fact of at least one game that moved audio content to HD and then streamed from there – because otherwise the audio content wasn’t doable. (And yes, it was important from a game point of view, and it was a very well selling game)

All that streaming is not going to happen. Result – longer load times. And unless it’s *evident* that 95% of the gamers have a HD, nobody will bother building the streaming in.

And I really don’t want to seem like a dick, but I just don’t understand how it’s easy to add extra content after the fact without a fixed disc. With, say the Halo 2 Map Pack, you’d put in the expansion, load everything into RAM, swap back to the game code disc and hope you had the memory management tight enough to fit ten unused maps while you were playing an eleventh? But, Microsoft was presenting more complicated things than that. Velocity Girl is going to be designing virtual T-shirts and distributing them worldwide (you remember that somewhat silly part of the E3 presentation, don’t you).

Here’s a quote from the Microsoft press release just after the 360 unveiling – “and access Xbox Live Marketplace to download demos and trailers along with new game levels, maps, weapons, vehicles, skins, classic arcade and card and board games, community-created content, and more to the detachable Xbox 360 hard drive ó all right out of the box at no extra cost.” Which is true for this box over here, not that less expensive box over there, I guess.

As much as the consumer part of my brain sometimes wants to tell companies where they can stick their micropayments, there probably is a new revenue stream there. That Halo 2 Map Pack has sold 200K copies at retail. That’s 4 million bucks. To throw some completely made-up numbers out, I’d say that much again in paid downloads of those maps is possible. That’s a lot of dough from people that already bought the game.

As for sales, I say at launch, the deluxe bundle wins hands down. Over the console lifetime, the core wins 4-to-1. I’m sure Microsoft’s projections show the unit sales from being able to market a $299 price outweigh the market from extra content. But, it still feels like a constriction of the possibility space, of the potential. I’m used to being disappointed like that after these things come out, not before.

So Microsoft put a hard drive in the console, driving up the per-unit cost and lowering the MTBF. And then the developers proceeded to make the exact same junk, didn’t use the hard drive in any way that they weren’t already using memory cards, and basically didn’t live up to their word.

If MS knew in advance that developers were going to effectively ignore the hard drive, they would never have put it in the unit. At this point, they’re just putting it in the “deluxe” model because the market expects them to. At least, that’s my take on it.

I also think psu is wrong: I predict that the entry-level Xbox will sell far better than the dee-luxe one. But then, I’ve been wrong before.

Downloadable content is easily packaged as an expansion pack on DVD that requires the original game to play.

But, doesn’t it just seem out of left field on Microsoft’s part? At their various “reveals” I heard as much about Live Marketplace, and micropayments, and user created contents, and being a media hub as I did about the games. Now, they’re releasing a “core” system that doesn’t seem like it’s built to do any of that.