Recently it became a widely reported news item that the Xbox 360’s lack of a guaranteed hard disc drive was “holding back” the development of Grand Theft Auto IV. But in a thinking, reasoning reality, this shouldn’t have been news at all. Having to struggle against the technical limitations of all consoles is, indeed, one of the chief challenges (one might say problems) with the multi-platform development strategy in place at the major publishers. During the PS2/Xbox time period, the PS2 “held back” dozens of games because of its own lack of a hard drive and mostly inferior specifications. Now the tables have reversed, but multi-platform developers are still mostly doing what they have always done – develop for the lowest spec machine and then port upwards.

At any rate, there is nothing in the Microsoft requirements that says a game can’t work better with a hard drive as long as the game works at all without one. In other words, developers for the 360 are quite able to take advantage of the hard drive if they have the time, ability and inclination to implement a system that can work in either case.