Wed, Sep 17, 2008 | 10:16 BST
Peter Moore: We dropped Xbox 1 because the hard drive “killed us”
Peter Moore’s revealed that Xbox’s hard drive cost $70 per unit, and was the main reason the machine was prematurely dropped in favour of Xbox 360.
“Not having a hard drive in every Xbox 360 was a hard decision, but we wanted to get price under control,” he said. “The hard drive in every Xbox killed us; we we’re still selling it at $199 and the hard drive was like $70. That’s why we prematurely left the original Xbox, because the more we were selling – there was still great demand – it was killing us, and there was no way to bring the price down.
“So in the end we determined at around the 25 million unit mark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell any more, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could. And to this day people still believe we left the Xbox too early but it was purely for financial purposes.”
Moore made the comments in the third part of an ongoing Guardian interview. Which you’d be daft not to read.
9 comments
#1
Blerk
17/09/08, 10:26 am
While I’m sure there’s truth in that, the opportunity to get a head-start on Sony for the new generation was surely a bigger factor?
Amusing too, ‘cos didn’t the bottom fall out of hard drive pricing not long after this?
I still think it was a mistake not to bundle the HDD into the basic 360. It’s so completely at odds with the direction they’ve always been pushing the machine in. To my mind they should’ve turned the old 20gb Premium into the new Arcade and started to phase out the HDD-less models rather than cutting the price quite so much.
#2
Rhythm
17/09/08, 10:35 am
Agreed on the phasing out of Arcade units. There shouldn’t have ever been 360s released without storage. I’m positive that there’s more than a few developers who were unhappy with MS for that decision
#3
patlike
17/09/08, 10:37 am
I think what he’s saying is that there had to be a hard drive-less SKU or the cost would have been out of control. Case in point is PS3. Blu-ray was a big contributor to its cost, sure, but there’s a reason there’s no HD cable in the box.
#4
Rhythm
17/09/08, 10:43 am
Fair enough but they already have a base unit onto which you clip an HDD. Why insist on selling the core unit? Why couldn’t they all have been bundled with the cheapest HDD that suited the time? Devs could have been assured of being able to work with HDDs and costs would be minimised at MS’ end
#5
Retroid
17/09/08, 10:52 am
It’s because of the HDD that the Xbox could do several of the most impressive games like Splinter Cell Chaos Theory & Double Agent, Doom 3 etc. I can understand how it was crippling them at the time but hell’s bells, the cache work it did meant we got some games it otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do.
Remains to be seen whether that’ll happen with 360 but I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t.
#6
Robo_1
17/09/08, 10:55 am
So Rare, a spent creative force? Whilst he never says that directly, it’s pretty clear he has lost a lot of faith in Rare. Personally I think Viva Piniata is the most creative game MS have published on the 360. My gf is a big fan of the series.
#7
pjmaybe
17/09/08, 11:49 am
He’s right but not because of the cost of the HDs, more the fact that having a HD in there made the thing hackable and eminently suited to running “backups”
#8
Psychotext
17/09/08, 12:06 pm
Anyone interested in getting a bit more info on this should consider reading Takahashi’s “The Xbox 360 Uncloaked”. Covers all the info about not being able to cost reduce the original xbox, how the hard drive costs hardly changed over time and much more.
/sounds like an online marketer!
#9
deftangel
17/09/08, 2:30 pm
Takahashi’s book is brilliant, well worth a read.
I agree and disagree. I understand perfectly why they cut the HDD but ultimately they should have just found some way of managing it. They must have known the Arcade unit would not have been relevant until it gets to $199 so why bother releasing it till now when it might have been more feasible to get the hdd in there for less.