Pachter: 20GB hard drive no longer sufficient |
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BY Rain Anderson March 8th, 2008 |
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Analyst Michael Pachter has weighed in on the recent rumors of the hard drive in the 20GB Xbox 360 model being replaced with a 60GB one in June. Pachter said the 20GB hard drive is no longer sufficient and that console manufacturers misjudged the amount of downloadable content consumers would fill their systems with.
“Frankly, the surprise to me is that the new SKU is [purportedly] 60GB. I mean, I would think they’d introduce a 200GB or 500GB and eliminate the 20GB and make the 120GB the standard cheapie one. I think that more is better, although I don’t think most people will fill up their hard drive; but I think that as you feel you’re getting close you start to be less likely to download content,” Pachter told GameDaily BIZ.
“These guys are doing a great job getting people to download levels and casual games, and even though those files are relatively small I think Microsoft would like Xbox 360 to turn into a whole media center and allow you to use your 360 as a DVR, and that would actually be a fairly compelling offering. Obviously they’ve already got people online so if they can turn an Internet device into more of a media device I think it gives it some competitive advantage over the PS3. And they have to respond to PS3 because that very much is becoming a media device with their winning the Blu-ray [vs. HD DVD] battle,” Pachter continued.
Microsoft upping the size of the hard drives is certainly good news as long as they can keep the prices the same. The 20GB hard drive wasn’t even enough when the 360 launched in 2005. People who like to download new demos and trailers filled up the hard drive pretty quickly even back then, when much less content was available on LIVE, forcing them to keep an eye on things so the HDD wouldn’t get filled unexpectedly.
March 8th, 2008
at 8:35 pm
I’m more concerned about the cost of the individual hard drive units. People who want to upgrade existing Xbox 360 hard drives are faced with higher prices per gigabyte, not to mention a proprietary interface which prevents people looking to upgrade from using much cheaper readily available drives with much higher capacities than what Microsoft is offering. Microsoft’s hard drive approach is really one big misstep. All that Microsoft can do now is to release higher capacity hard drive units however if they do not match the cost of standard hard drives, they will simply price themselves out of competition with their main competitor, which just happens to allow people to use any off the shelf SATA laptop hard drive, thus making hard drive upgrades far more affordable than the Xbox 360’s.