Why the PS3 has a mandatory hard drive

Posted by Talk Playstation

on Sep.18, 2008 at 4:51 pm

Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida explains why Sony decided against Xbox 360’s optional hard drive and that a mandatory hard was to provide seamless gameplay and solid digital distribution for every Playstation 3 owner.

“It’s one of the things we really supported when the hardware specification was decided for PS3,”

“Like Microsoft did, we could have had an optional hard drive and settled for cheaper combinations of hardware, but if we had done that - from a [development] standpoint - we cannot rely on every consumer to have a hard drive.”

“So that really helps us to focus on [the fact that] every consumer has a hard drive. Now we can cache data so that gameplay is seamless.”

Yoshida gave an example of a game that requires a hard drive to play.

“One example is the Uncharted game we did last year,”

“You don’t this, but the game is constantly caching the data in the hard drive so that you don’t have to wait for loading.”

So there you go, that is why the PS3 has a mandatory hard drive.

“Also having the space for consumers to download stuff allows us to create games only for digital distribution that are a couple of gigabytes in size,”

Source.

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