I found this little bit from Phil Harrison to be very interesting:
(
www.eurogamer.net/article..._id=64667)
Quote:
Eurogamer: Your strategy and Microsoft's strategy are very divergent, in that Microsoft is offering consumers a choice - whether to have HD-DVD or not, whether to have a hard drive or not - while you're putting everything into a very expensive box and saying that they take all or nothing. Why that direction? Why not have a system where people who don't want to pay that premium for Blu-Ray don't have to?
Phil Harrison: Leaving aside the movie debate about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, purely from a game design point of view and a game production point of view, we have to have Blu-Ray. DVD is just not big enough; DVD9 is nowhere near big enough for the kind of games, the richness that we're going to be putting in the games, the variety, the detail, you name it.
So, we had to adopt Blu-Ray primarily as a game format. The second benefit of it is that it becomes a video format as well. Putting it all in one box, as you say, is also down to the fact that a hard disc drive is necessary to create a totally integrated network platform. We want every consumer to be able to download and install content on their hard disc drive. If you want to put all your music on your hard disc drive, you'll probably go for the 60GB version. If you're a complete music fan and video fan, and you want to have huge amounts of digital content, then you can upgrade to whatever size of drive you like. You can put any in that you like - it is a computer, after all.
Eurogamer: So that hard drive is a standard PC drive?
Phil Harrison: ATA, bog standard, yeah.
Eurogamer: You're not going to be selling Sony drive upgrades?
Phil Harrison: We've got no plan to. We may offer something, but we have no plan to at the moment.
If this actually ends up being true, and you are able to pop in ANY ATA hard drive into the PS3, for the techies, this strikes a BIG blow to Microsoft's overpriced 360 HDD. For the same price as Microsoft's 20 gig HD, you can grab a 250 gig'er? Sign me up.
On the downside, I'm still looking to put this in the "too good to be true" file at the moment, if for no other reason than the fact that Sony has done quite well with their accessories, or more specifically, memory cards. Just as ludicrous as Microsoft's $100 20 gig 360 HD is Sony's $25 card carrying 8 megs of flash memory. If the PS3 can use both any third party hard drive as well as memory formats that have little or nothing to do with Sony (ie, CompactFlash instead of Sony's Memory Sticks), that'll represent a large amount of revenue that they'll no longer be able to take advantage of. Call me crazy, but I can't see Sony just wanting to skip out on that money just to give us the consumer more options.
On a semi-related note, I do also wonder how storing video content on the PS3 will work. Can you simply connect the machine to any computer and download a variety of content (MP4, DivX, DVD) to the HD, much like you can with XBMC (or the PSP for MP4)? Or will it be restricted like it is on the 360, allowing you to only stream certain file types from a Media Center-enabled PC? Or perhaps the "huge amounts of digital content" will simply be DRM'd media downloaded from Sony's version of the XBL Marketplace?
Inquiring minds want to know.
