According to Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, the Playstation 3 will come with a slot on its underside for a 2.5” hard drive, but the drive will be sold desperately. Much like the Playstation 2, the drive will be used by a very small number of games, such as MMORPGs.

So, is this just speculation, or does Famitsu know something that we don’t? Ken Kutaragi had said that Sony has not made a final decision on whether it will ship a hard drive with the Playstation 3 or not.

First off, Sony has said time and again that they want the Playstation 3 to be much more than a game console. They want it to be the media center of every home in the world. They want you to be able to store your photos, movies, telephone calls, blood, and DNA on this machine. Well, you can’t do that unless there’s something to store it all on. If someone buys a Playstation 3, which has a projected astronomical price tag, they’re probably going to buy it for gaming and not much else. Unless the hard drive is included, those features will, for the most part, go unused.

Of course, they could have, as I call it, “Sony Syndrome” - the bug to have a potentially huge windfall by forcing their customers to buy a separate peripheral. They do it now with the memory card and memory stick devices, so why not with a hard drive? Their line of thinking is probably “since we have this device that can do all of this neat stuff that needs a huge amount of data storage, why don’t we sell a hard drive separately at a 40% markup?”

The reason, boys and girls, why you don’t sell the hard drive as a peripheral for your new “media center that happens to play games” is because you want it to be a media center! The second you force a customer to “upgrade” in order to use the “media center” components is the very second that your media center device becomes a gaming console once again.

Of course, if the Playstation 3 doesn’t ship with a hard drive, that means that the next generation console titles will either all be Xbox 360 exclusive, or they’ll simply never use the hard drive feature, because the greater number of customers will be those without drives.

Sony, I’m begging you: include the hard drive. It’ll make the lives of your customers and developers that much easier.

Wait … did I just ask Sony, of all companies, to make the lives of their customers easier and cheaper? I must be high, because that’s never going to happen.

Provided by Geekstreak