G.I. interview with J. Allard.
We\'ve heard from developers that because there will be some customers without hard drives for their 360s, that developers are mad that they can\'t automatically utilize the hard drive like in the original Xbox.
I think what you want to do is leave the option open. One of the things we did with the first Xbox was we said, "Look, party on the hardware all you want. You can use 100 percent of the resources in the very first Xbox." And that locked us in to having the exact same spec going forward for the first five years. We can\'t take the hard drive out of the Xbox because it breaks Halo. It breaks launch titles. And so we didn\'t want to have that constraint again, so we\'ve been selective this time, and we\'ve said to developers, "Hey look, don\'t bank on the hard drive always being there. There may be a scenario in the future where we don\'t want to have a hard drive, and in that case, we have to make sure that the games that you\'ve created are accessible to the broadest possible audience." And that\'s what they want as well. So we\'re saying, "Don\'t bank on it, but use the crap out of it, because there\'s gonna be a ton of machines with hard drives no matter what happens in the future."
We worked on it with them, and one of the things we did was we ended up going with a high-speed optical drive; a dual-layered DVD solution, which is 12x read speed on both layers. That gives them really good read-through performance, and allows them the ability to do a lot of things they used to do on the hard drive on the disc. It also gives them more capacity on the disc with some of the compression stuff that we did that they used to use the hard ddrive for.
Whta I won\'t do is what PlayStation did in this last generation, which I think is really dangerous, which is to say, "Use the spec of the machine, and we\'re gonna keep sellling more machines that you can sell more games on," and then redesign the system in a way that you can\'t play that game any more. If I was Square, I\'d be furious at the PS2 redesign [Final Fantasy XI was only playable with a hard drive, which the redesign did not support - ed]. Great, you redesigned the system and lowered the price to get a broader audience for Sony, but not for me? That\'s terrible.
