XboxOneDev, a verified member of the console’s development team, has just teased gamers on Reddit with a screenshot that suggests that Microsoft’s product will soon support external hard drives.
Considering the huge amount of space that modern games take up on the hard drives that video game consoles are equipped with, support for external storage should have been a default feature, not an upgrade that comes several months after the launch of the main product. Yet, it’s good that Microsoft thought of offering such support at all. Better yet, Xbox One and its competitor, the PS4, should have come with larger hard drives to start with, as the cost of 1GB has decreased dramatically in the past years. Still, that might have affected the gamers’ decision to make upgrades, and from a marketing viewpoint, it’s better to offer benefits bit by bit, to make sure that the customers have reasons to come back to you.
Currently, gamers can only use about 362GB out of the 500GB that come with the Xbox One, and that’s enough space for about 20 games. They do have the option to expand that space by purchasing and installing a third-party hard drive, but according to Microsoft, that voids their warranty. Offering support for external hard drives is one of the best updates the Redmond giant could bring to their video game console, as it thus enables gamers to expand their storage by up to 4TB (if no other wicked solutions are used).
The Xbox 360 got USB storage support five years after its launch, so the fact that Microsoft is preparing to roll out this feature just a few months after Xbox One’s release means that the company is finally realizing the needs of the gamers in terms of storage. Modern titles may not offer more gameplay, but the graphic details became extraordinary, and that definitely eats a bit chunk of storage.
In other news, the main competitor of Microsoft in this department isn’t resting, either, and it announced that PlayStation Now private Beta will be available on the PS4 as of tomorrow. The competition between Sony and the Redmond giant got even fiercer when Microsoft decided to cut the price of the Xbox One by $100, while also removing Kinect from the standard configuration. For gamers, it’s now even more difficult to choose between the two consoles.
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