Microsoft Slashes Price of HDD, Will New Games Require One?

Kris Erickson • Oct 15, 2008 • Comments ()

We have good news today for owners of Xbox 360 consoles that are not yet equipped with a hard drive. Microsoft is running a special promotion through their corporate website that allows qualifying 360 owners to purchase a refurbished 20 GB HDD for only $20, or get a free 512 MB memory card. While this drive is small, and barely sufficient to hold all of the glorious HD content and XBLA games you will end up downloading, it is a great way to get started for those who bought an introductory level 360. To take advantage of this offer, head to this site and enter your console serial number.

We suspect that there could be two major reasons for this sudden price drop. firstly, the Xbox Live Experience upgrade that is coming next month will undoubtedly make heavy use of the HDD. Between new community games and streaming Netflix movies, a hard drive is almost guaranteed to be necessary. In fact, Microsoft even says as much on their site:

"In order to connect to Xbox LIVE and enjoy everything the new Xbox Experience has to offer, you will need an Xbox 360 Hard Drive. While you can connect to Xbox LIVE using an Xbox 360 Memory Unit with 128MB of available space, you will not be able to enjoy all the great features like Xbox LIVE Primetime and video downloads."

The other reason for the storage upgrade may have to do with a shift in strategy for games. With Sony touting some incredible Blu-ray only experiences, the Xbox 360 feels somewhat limited in storage capacity. Multi-disk installs for open world games would help level out this disparity, but this would require that all models of the 360 came standard with a hard drive. Perhaps some upcoming games (like Rage?) will require a hard drive for use on the 360.