Rumor: Xbox Natal is Actually Microsoft's Next Console

[TonyTheTiger]

I have been around for a long time, I know the "to store what?" reply and have been hearing for years. In 1994, I bought a 1.26 gig HD. "For what?", they said? 500 megs was enough. In 1999 or so I bought a 40 gig HD. "What are you storing with that?", they said. In 2005, I bought a 300 gig. "Why so big?" My reply then was "Because a terrabyte isn't commercially available yet."

You don't see what could possibly require 50 gigs? In 1990 they didn't see what would requre more than a mere 10 MEGS (not gigs). Wait until the cycle of systems after 2010/2012. By 2020, anything less than a full terra will be unacceptable.

As stated above, a HDD is hardly an equivalent analogy. I'm sure you used those drives for many, many purposes and constantly added new stuff without deleting other stuff. When you make a game you generally don't add stuff to the media once it ships out. People will work within their limitations and always manage to use what they're given. If you give somebody three months to write a term paper, he will take three months. If you give him three weeks, he'll be done in three weeks.

And of all potential bottlenecks and technical problems, storage space is rarely the most immediate limitation. Time, money, and other related technologies are. Even the ground level things like artistic ability matters more. You could give current developers a 1,000 TB format to work with and they wouldn't be pumping out games that look and sound head and shoulders above what we're currently getting. What they would do is not compress anything and pad the disc to screw up potential pirates who will shit themselves when they see a torrent of a file far larger than their HDD can hold.