You’ll have to forgive me for the long rant, but I just wanted to get this out there.

Basically, what we know is that the 360 released in 2005, a year before the PS3. It gained a lot of traction, big userbase, the works, and was touted as the system that would rival the PlayStation 3. When the PS3 came out, it was shown to be bulky and very expensive.

Let’s look at the development lifecycle of each.

The 360 started off with Core and Pro SKUs, the former lacking a hard drive. This move seems peculiar, as the 360’s predecessor came with a hard drive as a prerequisite. They also initially had an HD-DVD addon for people who wished to watch HD-DVD movies, but didn’t have the money to afford a full-fledged HD-DVD player. The Core was eventually discontinued, and replaced with an Arcade model instead. When the Blu-ray format won, the HD-DVD addon was also discarded.

The PlayStation 3 started off with having a hard drive as a prerequisite, as well as the Blu-ray drive. At the time, the BD drive was considered one of the biggest factors that contributed to the price of the PS3, with the top models ranging close to $599 US at the time (the 360 was somewhere around $399). Arguably, people who bought PS3s during its early years had to be practically rich, but at least they came with PS2 backwards compatibility.

Technical specifications aside, both consoles have their strengths and weaknesses.

Now before I continue, I should admit that I have been playing with a PS3 since mid-2008 when MGS4 came out, and a 360 around winter. I was able to upgrade the PS3’s hard drive painlessly, but when it came to the 360 I found the prices were staggering; alternative, cheaper hard drives were to be had on eBay, and if you were tech-savvy enough you could hack your own hard drive and have it installed (but the average consumer wouldn’t know this level of detail).

Anyway, the PS3’s development environment was found to be a nightmare, pushing a lot of developers to work on the 360 as opposed to the PS3. You can see this in the game library available for both systems, and only recently did larger names like Capcom manage to go fully multi-platform without any hiccups on both systems (though the process to get there is a bumpy one). The 360 on the other hand, was mostly similar to Windows development environments, and made things much easier for developers to work with; that is not to say that developing for the 360 will provide more in a game than the PS3 ever will, or vice versa. It’s totally dependent on the skill of the programmers, the management involved in the development process, and so on.

The problem starts rearing its ugly head however, late in the game; digital distribution.

The PS3 has been able to cope very well with this; as it has a required hard drive, the operating system for the PS3 is loaded on there. Any games that require a full-blown update (e.g., 500 MB or more) rather than just a patch have done very unique things. Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and White Knight Chronicles use the Sony servers, Metal Gear Online uses torrents (or their own servers), and so on. There may be more games, but I haven’t looked at the whole library.

The 360 however, is actually in a bit of a pickle. You will notice that DLC for games are very small, limiting the functionality that can be updated. Those games that can be updated like on the PS3, require a hard drive to begin with. Final Fantasy XI, and Phantasy Star Universe are examples of games on the 360 that require a hard drive.

Further compounding the problem on the 360 is the New Xbox Experience (NXE) that came out only Fall of last year. Sure, it’s great, it totally changes the dashboard, and I’m liking it (though I have not had much experience with the old dashboard). The problem however, is that to fully utilize NXE requires you sacrifice at least 128 MB on your Memory Unit; that is, if you own an Xbox 360 Arcade unit. As we are all aware, the 360 does not come with a hard drive as a prerequisite, instead coming with a solid storage device that will hopefully store all your savegames. But now that NXE has been deployed, you lose half of that space, and users are now forced to either try to survive with a slightly bummed out 360, or spend the extra money on a hard drive (which, by the way, is very overpriced compared to buying a regular 2.5″ SATA hard drive with the same capacity).

I was fine with the NXE simply because I had upgraded my 360 with a hard drive (eventually), but when you come online on games like Halo 3 or Lost Planet, you’ll see the problem arises further. A good percentage of online users (don’t have exact numbers on me) do not own a 360 hard drive; they can’t afford it. What is going to happen to these people? We are seeing more updates to the NXE come down the pipeline, and I’m happy and all that they’re adding new functionality, but what is going to happen to the people who haven’t been able to afford the storage space?

Games on Demand and Netflix movies on 360 are also a great addition, but the sheer size of the things you have to buy off the XBL Marketplace demands you have a hard drive; a Memory Unit just won’t cut it anymore, with GoD downloads nearing somewhere around 4 GB, maybe even 7 GB if you’re not lucky. Netflix movies, well, I haven’t downloaded any, but I must imagine they’re similar to movie sizes that you might download via torrent or other methods, but nonetheless very large and not suitable for the Memory Unit. In E3 2009, Microsoft was touting that people no longer needed discs to watch movies, and that they simply needed to download them; the problem is, how much of the userbase can afford that kind of luxury?

Finally, we are seeing Japanese 360 games start moving back to the PS3; we saw Tales of Vesperia and Star Ocean: The Last Hope use a chunk of the development money for the 360 get put into the PS3 ports, and it has shown results. Tales of Vesperia sales are set to beat the 360, and I must imagine the same holds true for Star Ocean, as an international version that’s bilingual and everything is coming out as well. Microsoft may have had an initial lead by offering incentives for Japanese developers to work on the 360, but now it’s starting to bite them in the ass.

When the 360 was developed, it was designed as a counter to the PS3, but it lacked one thing; predicting the PS3’s weaknesses and attacking them, while keeping all the strengths. But as time passed, it’s becoming more clear that this strategy was not followed. The same paradigm used for the original Xbox was indeed used for the 360, whereas the PS3 went with keeping a Blu-ray drive despite opposition, as well as a hard drive as a pure prerequisite for everything. Some might see the hard drive as offsetting the slow access speeds the BD drive offers, and maybe that could be true, but we are moving into a part of the gaming age where digital distribution is becoming the norm, and it’s not going to work out for the 360 at all in the near future should more NXE updates come in; particularly ones that expand beyond the capacity of the Xbox 360 Arcade.

Should that time finally come, Microsoft will have two choices; abandon the HDD-less 360, or develop a new Xbox console? Whichever method they pick, the PS3 will still be around, but a lot of 360 owners are going to be alienated; it’s a ticking time bomb, and people will likely start taking bets on when it will go off.

P.S. This is not an article that is telling you to buy a PS3 over a 360, and vice versa. My motto is, and always was, buy a console with the games you want to play. This article is merely insight on potential problems that might appear in the future.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.