"Every Durango console will have a hard drive, although its exact capacity has not been chosen," reads help documentation in the Durango XDK. "It will be large enough, however, to hold a large number of games. All games will be installed on the hard drive. Play from the optical disc will not be supported."
If you don't' really think about it, it doesn't seem like too much of a bad idea. However if you really look at that statement, it means that all of your games owned will be stored on one console. Presumably this means you will need to authenticate the games and sync the code to some sort of cloud for your account. If this isn't true, then if your system goes down in flames, so did your entire game collection. This could also mean that they are more focusing on their online market. Which doesn't bode so well for stores and websites that sell used games.
It seems like Microsoft is getting a bit greedy. If they take away the physical market then they are killing jobs for the ones who make CD's and write the data on them. Where this is done, I don't know. Probably China, but still, they are cutting out a market. I know that the sales for all of the companies has been a bit low, especially Nintendo, but Microsoft is the leading company in computer software, to cut out the amount that the game retailers get, which is already small, just seems greedy.
This system also better be able to have a replaceable hard drive, unless this thing has a terabyte hard drive you're going to need different ones because this sucker is going to fill up fast on game data. I've also read somewhere that they plan on moving to blu-ray in order to fit all the data on one disk. I think they missed the boat with this idea.
Another thing that Microsoft has disclosed is that the system will be "always on and always connected." What this means exactly is unknown. However the speculation is mixed. This could mean that even when the system is hibernating it will stay up-to-date and you don't need to worry about updating your games and your system. The down side to this is that unless you have unlimited data with your internet you'll be eating up your data like candy. The other side to the "always online" thing is that this unless you are online your Durango will not play anything or possibly not even turn on.
Obviously this is all speculation, the quote at the top and the picture were "confirmed" by an IGN employee who got this information from an employee at Microsoft. Now I never trust what IGN says about video games, however in the same breath this could also be said to Microsoft. If this is true they should have never trusted IGN. One way or another, if this is true, only the hard core Xbox fans are going to get this new system. If this isn't true than chest-high wall shooters are here to stay.
