One of those highly paid analyst types from Wedbush has gone on record saying that the only thing holding back a true-to-life Xbox 360 game download service, à la Steam, is hard drive capacity. Right now, you can buy a 120GB hard drive for $140 on Amazon, which is ridiculous given the low, low prices of standard hard drives these days. (A recent CrunchDeal spotted a 1TB hard drive for $77.) So if Microsoft is serious about launching such a service, it needs to do something about bringing large capacity hard drives at normal prices. There’s no reason that a 120GB hard disk drive should cost $140 in the year 2009.
Similarly, that same analyst, a Mr. Michael Pachter, said that retailers had better get used to the idea of a day-and-date download service. Generally speaking, publishers don’t give a damn which way games are sold so long as they get their cut of the action. (They’ll also bitch about piracy, but that won’t be nearly as big a problem on the Xbox 360 as it is on the PC.) Retailers may not like getting squeezed out, especially if the downloadable version is cheaper than the retail copy (and why wouldn’t it be?), but that’s not our problem.
UPDATE Whoops, compared the wrong type of drive. The Xbox 360 uses a 2.5-inch drive, not a 3.5-inch drive. A quick search on Newegg pulls up a 500GB 2.5-inch drive for $90. It’s only 5400RPM, but the point remains: the price of the Xbox 360 HDD really ought to be lowered if Microsoft wants the download service to be any type of success.
If the download/purchase schemes get really hot, companies like GameStop will be in real trouble (not that they aren’t already).
And yes, XBox HD prices are outrageous.
1TB for $77? Seriously? Only a few years before 1TB HD on computers will be standard equipment, I suppose.
Sure, 1TB for $77 ($0.08/GB) is great and all, but unless I’m mistaken, that’s for a 3.5″ drive and the 360 takes a 2.5″ drive. The largest available 2.5″ sata drive available to the general consumer is 500GB for $85. Even taking this into account, that’s twice the price of the 1TB 3.5″ drive ($0.17/gB). In comparison, MS wants $0.86/gB; unreasonable no matter how you slice it. But as long as there remains a market (i.e. people keep buying them) then MS has no reason to allow the use of standard, 2.5″ drives in their hardware.
Actually, the MS drive is $1.16/GB, which is even more ridiculous.
/MathNazi
Ah, I swapped the 2 numbers; thanks for the catch!
PC’s for the WIN! (again)
I’m not defending MS’ prices on HDD, because I agree that they are ridiculous, but comparing the prices of the 360 HDD (2.5″) with a 3.5″ drive is disingenuous.
How about comparing it to the same 2.5 drives the PS3 uses? I upgraded mine to a 160 GB Western Digital for about $60 on NewEgg at least six months ago.
The system had some great software on it to make the process simple, too. Took three minutes to swap out the drive (fool proof process), and then just restored the OS to it and uploaded my saved content from a USB stick. Quick and easy. No proprietary garbage. Use the old drive now as a fail safe backup for my music collection after temporarily putting into an SATA enclouse and formatting as FAT32. Now its sitting in the WD 160 GB box protecting my music collection. Everyone wins, and cheaply too.
Originally, when the 120GB upgrade kit came out it used Fujitsu MHW2120BH laptop drives. I’m not sure if Microsoft has changed suppliers since the last time I’ve check into this but, those drives have come down a bit in price. But, we need to remember everything that goes into the manufacture of the kit, custom molded plastic enclosure, custom SATA connector, product packaging and of course the custom partition and format of the drive itself – all of which increase the cost (also remember that the case and connectors are the same as the 20GB kit already in production). It would be interesting to see one of the tear down sites do a cost estimate on this thing. Doesn’t matter though Microsoft will continue to rip the consumer off with this as long as possible.
Maybe they should have taken a leaf out of Sony’s book and not forced consumers to pay for that? Any idiot can format a drive, and as for the casing and product packaging, its highly unnecessary. It only needs to slide somewhere inside the machine, its not like some amazing peripheral sitting on top of the 360, its just a harddrive. But hey, I love Micro$oft.
Doesn’t the damned thing have a USB port? Why don’t they simply USE THE DAMNED USB PORT FOR HARD DRIVES?? :P
USB 2.0 speeds aren’t really an issue in most circumstances (ie HD video downloads, music, etc) and the games can continue to reside on the much faster, proprietary, vendor-locked-in hard drive attachment that you spend an arm and a leg to purchase. :P Microsoft… Bah!
This is funny. If everyone had looked past the initial price of the Xbox 360, and realised they’d have to pay for just about everything extra and it HAS to be Microsoft branded, they would have payed a little more for a PS3 and not worried about nonsense like this. Bang any 2.5″ harddrive into the PS3 and its happy. Not Microsoft. You gotta pay for their harddrive (monopoly, anyone?) and the biggest they offer is only 120gb and outrageously priced. Good call on buying that 360, wasn’t it!
wow you could not be more of a troll could you dan or should i say fanboy.
I’m not a fanboy, in any situation I go for value, clearly best offered by Playstation in this round. Microsoft don’t even seem to be ashamed of being money-grubbing, let alone try to hide it, which its a high deterrent for me from just about all of their products.