The billion-dollar decision to include a hard disk in the PlayStation 4 was definitely the right call to make, says Naughty Dog’s Drew Thaler, who reckons it would have ‘sucked’ for developers and gamers alike had Sony opted not to ship with one.
Thaler’s comments come following PS4 Lead Architect Mark Cerny’s revelation that Sony flirted with the idea of an alternate storage device for its next-generation home console, such as flash memory.
Ultimately, the PS4 came with a HDD; and it’s just as well too, as Thaler reckons the console just wouldn’t have been the same without one.
"Yeah, we spent so much effort working on whether we could make a PS4 without a HDD. Just wouldn’t have been the same," said Thaler on Twitter (via GamePur).
"No HDD had a precedent — the X360 Core — but we felt it would suck for both devs and players. Glad we didn’t go there.
"We considered all kinds of things. Hard to beat discs for capacity vs cost though."
Naughty Dog, of course, was amoung many of the first and third-party developers that Sony looked to for advice when developing the PS4.