Only hard drive size holding 360 back Comments by Games Industry.biz

"The problem is, if Microsoft allowed 3rd party 3.5" HDDs, then you could buy a 1.5Tb HDD, for only £5 more than their 120Gb one"

Sony did that (well, 2.5" disks, but they aren't much more expensive than the 3.5" models), why can't MS?
I hadn't had my PS3 for long before I upgraded the 40 GB disk to a 250 GB model - and now you can probably get a 750 or 1 TB for the same price as I paid a year ago - while I've held back on a much needed upgrade of the 20 GB disk in my 360 because of the exorbitant price of the 120 GB disk (although admittedly if I still used my 360 much I probably would have shelled out the money by now).

That's the same price policy as Apple's. If you want to upgrade the HDD of a Mac mini, you'll have to pay a ridiculous price...or do it by yourself and loose the warranty.

You lose your warranty if you switch hard drive in a PS3?

A full game takes up 4 gig (give or take). So therefor to need 1TB - you'd have to download around 250 full priced games.

Now - come on....

The current XBOX hard drive range are hideously overpriced. I can get 1tv of storage for half the price of a 120gb 360 hard drive now, and well over 1.5tb for the same price.

Yeah, I know it's not exactly the same, but there's still one helluva lot of markup in there for the sake of a bit of DRM.

As for downloads - well, it's inevitable, but it wont cannibalise the high street sales for a long time yet, as given the option, people will still buy physical media.
iTunes and the like have been around for years, yet CDs and DVDs are doing a swift business. Heck, sales may be down, but they are not out by any measure.

As for pricing, well, ask yourself this - why are Steam games more expensive than high street versions of the same game?

One of the few nice things about digital distributions is that is not having to get up to change discs. Yes, I said it. I don't know how many times I have played the game in the machine instead of the one I most want to play simply because I would have to get up and change the disc. It's funny 'cause it's true!

That being said, I can't stomach downloaded media at full retail (box) prices.

@ Mithis

500GB is the biggest you can get at the moment for a 2.5" SATA. I've had mine for nearly a year in my PS3 and I've got just under 3GB free. Not impressed that manufacturers haven't moved on in 12 months.

I think in the long run MS are simply going to HAVE to lower the prices of their HDDs, especially since if digital distribution is how they want to go, and therefore start making serious money from, then it'll benefit them in the end. Plus of course since the current prices are totally overblown, when they bring them down to realistic pricing it's not like they'll be making a loss or anything, but able to reap far more from the digital downlading of films, games etcetera which people will 'finally' be able to actually FIT onto their 360. At long last. Bring it on.

much like others, i bougt mine back when 20gb was the only option, and im notforking out for a hugely over priced HD, and not going to download a load over 5 or 6gb games with a tiny HDD.

i would love to get a bigger HDD but im not paying that price

I refuse to be dependent on my internet connection for my gaming needs.

It does seem as if this was a rather short sighted decision by MS to begin with, especially when they are pushing so hard for digital distribution only.

They need to bring down the price of the HDDs replacements pronto and at the very least offer a new SKU with a larger HDD.

Its one of the things i think Sony got bang on with the PS3, being able to easily swap out the HDD for any standard laptop drive was a great decision.

Umm you know you can upgrade your Hard drive to a 120gb for cheap following these instructions...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/150970/up...

*strokes PS3 with 350GB HDD he got for £25*

It should be noted, that the XBOX360 only supports HDDs as big as 120GB and only Western Digital ones, afaik. Also, it is against M$s EULA to use other HDDs than the original M$ one. Furthermore, you'll risk getting banned off XBL as a result, especially if you're using a wrong hddss.bin file.

@smelly
There are many games that use more space than 4 GB. Looking at the PS3, 4GB is a joke and looking at the future of gaming, it's even more of a joke.

This obviously means that Microsoft has no intention of ever including a BluRay player in the X360 console.

A shame really, as I personally prefer something tangible and I can read manuals/instructions for in various locations, not just glued in front of a screen or on a tiny display that does my eyes in!

In addition, physical media also means that you have a back-up of your games and if you treat the discs well, they'll last you for as long as you find the game interesting to play.

With DLC, the second-hand market will die, so no more selling old games on eBay or to your friends etc.

Also, one other aspect that I'd be worried about, if X360 games became completely digital, is the fact of security. If you want to retire your machine, give it to a younger sibling or pass it on or even sell it to a complete stranger, you'd need to keep the HDD content intact, right? Because your games are all DLC on the HDD.

So that means everything else you have will have to remain on there as well, unless you laboriously wish to go through it all and delete it 'by hand', which for a big drive may be a complete nightmare to do!

And would this content delivery method also mean that the subject of DRM would raise its ugly head once again?!

Think about it...

I dont think blu-ray is the way to go for games anyway. What you need is to find clever and innovative ways at reducing the game size. Having a budget if 50GB is too much in this age where thinigs are gearing up for DD. Sony are going to have a hard time offering the PS3 library for download in future.

@zedzee

Imo that's exactly what publishers would love to see. They receive no royalties from the second hand market, so imagine the profit they'd make by keeping the retailers out of the line, minimizing packaging costs, minimizing costs for reproduction (no media, e.g. Blu-Ray needed), minimizing costs for the console hardware itself (no expensive drive needed, e.g. Blu-Ray in the case of Sony), and forcing the customers to buy a brand new copy of the game, because there will be no second-hand copies of the game, and fighting piracy as well. The customer pays for the infrastructure through his monthly internet provider fees. While the required infrastructure may not be available at the moment (sometimes slow connections), this will change rapidly. Over here in Germany there are already a lot of 100 Mbit private connections available in big cities and there's no doubt that those type of connections will spread rapidly over the next years and until the next generation of console will arrive.

Well after my first 360 did its best Jack the ripper impersonation on several of my games, optical media ain't all that in my eyes, but since my 20gb drive can barely fit one game on it what with DLC demos etc as well and my 1mb connection is big balls at the best of times i can't see me joining this wonderful DD revolution anytime soon :(

I already have a 1tb hard drive in my computer, and i can't fill it up and i have plenty of games. So this will be a lasting drive if they do this.

However they have a hope in hell if i will be buying these games unless they are around £10 Cheaper than store prices. With a disk i don't need to go through the hassel downloading a game when i run out of space.

Of they are the same price they can fuck off, i will run down to the shop buy a disk, with a box a little book and whatever other goodies it comes with and save the hassel of a day of downloading, in which time i wont be able to play online because that will pause downloading, and when i buy it and find out its shit i can trade it in and get a handful of money which isn't possible with this.

Another boundary to this is the fact that the X360 doesn't recognise NTFS formatted drives at all and FAT32 (at least in terms of Windows ability to format FAT32 drives) is severely limited in terms of the capacity limit, certainly not the 500GB or 1TB sizes.

Yes there are ways around it, and don't say "use linux" (we get it you're special and superior in every way for going the way of the penguin, bravo. I bow to your smugness. No really.) as realistically most people can't be arsed with it just to format a drive. I formatted my external 550GB USB drive using third party tools so I could connect it to the Xbox for music playing or when I feel flush, streaming it via the laptop (a complete waste of electricity though). But your average user won't know the methods for doing it, you still can't store games on it and the fact the playlist is chopped to 100 songs when you enter a game is such a let-down.

So back to the original problem. MS could release a patch that adds in NTFS support and some way of locking an external or internal drive to the machine (similar to BIOS Locking an OEM OS I guess) or an HDD formatting utility that again locks it to your Xbox (done to avoid just taking your HDD to a friends Xbox and copying games). Or they are banking on broadband speed increases so that they hold the games you buy or rent from them over XBLive in a cloud-based server cluster and you can 'play on demand' with a short download time. That way you keep 5-10 games you regularly play and just remove and re-download from 'your cloud account' the ones you fancy every now and again.

Until they resolve the disk format issue then I don't think you will see larger drives being made available for the X360. Knowing MS when that happens it'll be in a big update (next NXE overhaul??) and promoted as a new feature (as opposed to it actually being a limitation - probably done to keep OS below a particular size I imagine). There is a few sites online that offer a method of obtaining a 120GB laptop drive (may have to be a specific model) for standard retail price and then going through a process for making it Xbox360 compatible (i.e an 360 elite HDD) but of course that invalidates the warranty.

MS though as always will exploit the hold they have over their end-users and whilst waiting for stocks of HDDs to run out and deciding the next step forward (i.e. everything online or increasing storage locally) they'll keep overcharging as they know users have no choice. The minute that changes this is a lost revenue stream.

/strokes 500GB RAID setup on PC

@Gaz40 - "I dont think blu-ray is the way to go for games anyway. What you need is to find clever and innovative ways at reducing the game size."

Yeah, by overcompressing all the assets so you have blocky looking videos, low fidelity sound and blurry textures. Sounds great! :P

Seriously though, take one of the HD movies Microsoft have as an example: the picture quality is nowhere near BD quality when comparing the same movie and the sound quality is inferior. A typical HD movie is under 4 GB, that's a lot less than the 20+ GB of a typical BD movie with HD audio. There are also no subtitles, not a big deal for some people but for those of us with hearing difficulties it's an insulting omission. Not everyone will be bothered about inferior A/V quality but if they aren't then why are they downloading HD videos in the first place? Doesn't downloading an HD movie mean you *are* bothered about A/V quality? :?

The Video Marketplace is nice for those that like to rent movies rather than buy them but it's lacklustre for those of us who want the best quality, like to collect movies and love extras and subtitles!!! That's why I don't believe that digital downloads will ever replace the disc entirely. Besides what would people give each other for Christmas if the disc disappears completely. A voucher for a three day download isn't quite the same thing is it?

@Darren

You responded to a statement about games and storage size with an answer about movies.

Fast, efficient coding on machines close to CPU/GPU capacity tend to have to use perception tricks which cause them to become more asset-heavy. Code is tiny in comparison to assets.

When it comes to games, the future is in more procedurally generated textures and environments and dynamic LoD. Things that currently have to take up space as lookup data but with more powerful machines can be calculated in realtime.

Just make the damn 500 GB drive and get on with it. MS would make money off such a move in the long run, even if they sold the device at no profit or at a loss.

Obviously, I'm a godlike expert in this matter. My will be done!

I wouldn't take this digital download stuff too seriously, bascially it's an easy add on for the 360 as they already have the Xbox originals. I think it's mainly aimed at the impulse or late night drunk purchaser and not someone who crawls the net for best bargain price. The PSPGo will determine in future whehter the download only model actually works...

I got my 120GB for Xmas - didn't have to pay a penny for it (although my girlfriend did, even then it was only £80).

Still too expensive though.