Manmademan said:
It's not a reasonable decision, since it's limiting what's possible with live arcade. The existence of the core is PRECISELY why you won't be seeing 500meg downloads like Tekken: dark ressurrection on live anytime soon.
The core is also breaking backwards compatability- it's not a priority for microsoft because no core users can take advantage of it. if EVERYONE had a hard drive and the ability to run back-compat software, I GUARANTEE things that SHOULD be playable but arent yet (Panzer dragoon I'm looking at you) would be up and running.
Users without hard drives can't even make use full use of the TV episode downloads etc, since they're simply too large for a mem card. There you go, fragmenting your market for no good reason.
I also suspect load times would be shorter since everyone would be optimizing for the hard drive, but I have no proof of this, so you can toss it in the "speculation" bin. reasons 1, 2, and 3 are good enough for me.
QFT. The Ps3 is notably more difficult to take advantage of than the 360. This comparison makes as much sense as looking at Ps2 vs. Dreamcast 2 months after launch and declaring a winner based on available games.
MS could easily reverse their live arcade policy, even with the existence of the memory card/core system. Obviously they have plenty of other downloadable content available that is much larger than 50MB, so there's nothing necessarily stopping them from removing the XBLA limit. The current limit is mostly a philosophical one ("take a game to your friends house! XBLA games should be short bite-sized experiences") rather than a hardware issue.
And even if every system had a hard drive, it's not like BC becomes super trivial all of a sudden. They'd still have to write the emulator for it. And honestly, the only people who worry about Panzer Dragoon Orta being compatible are probably already hardcore Xbox fans...and hardcore Xbox fans will own the 360 hard drive, so I don't see how the core system has anything to do with PDO not working on the 360. I'd love for PDO to be compatible too, but I'm not gonna pretend like game set the world on fire.
And once again, if you're the person who's looking to download TV shows on your game console, you'll just buy the hard drive anyway. It's not like if you buy a core system, you're stuck forever with no hard drive. If you buy a core system, you're obviously not interested in massive downloads so why would it even matter to them? And the load time thing is probably the only somewhat valid point...but some developers still take advantage of it sometimes so I wouldn't call it a "super critical" issue.
The 360 hard drive has waaaaay more content and support than the Xbox hard drive, so I don't see how the lack of standardization has really hurt it that badly.