Microsoft Studios boss Phil Spencer recently talked with OXM and revealed that the Xbox one was almost released without a disc drive.
"Obviously, after the announcement and E3, there was some feedback about what people wanted to change," he explained. "There was a real discussion about whether we should have an optical disc drive in Xbox One or if we could get away with a purely disc-less console, but when you start looking at bandwidth and game size, it does create issues."
This certainly could be the case. After all, Xbox One and PS4 owners are already finding their 500 gig hard drives woefully inadequate to handle the size of next-gen games. When a download of a retail game can run you 50 gigs you better be prepared for plenty of hard drive space and a decent internet connection. While most of us are blessed with fast broadband speeds there's plenty of people in the country who just don't have it available to them.
"So we decided - which I think was the right decision - to go with the Blu-ray drive and give the people an easy way to install a lot of content," says Spencer. "From some of those original thoughts, you saw a lot of us really focusing on the digital ecosystem you see on other devices - thinking of and building around that."
This will likely be the last system of physical media though, I bet. More and more people are heading towards buying games digitally- the ease of use is just too tempting. While there will also be people who like to own physical media (just look at the number of movies that were recently released on Collector's Edition VHS- yes, VHS- tapes) the world is just headed towards all-digital. This would have eliminated the PR issues Xbox had with DRM, after all- there's currently no way to trade or rent digital games.
But what do you think? Did they make a mistake by not abandoning disc drives and heading towards the future? Will we get to that point, or will there always be some sort of physical media for consoles?