Been wondering about this for years.
In: Technology
It’s always been a matter of speed and pricing. Early disc drives were slow and real time games need a bunch of data fast. So as soon as hard drives were a thing it made sense to install games to them so that games could load faster and do things like stream data in mid gameplay. Consoles lagged behind as they always do because they had to much cheaper than a full blown computer. Consoles were still able to rely on disc drives for awhile as the read speeds had become faster somewhat or consoles like the n64 used cartridges which while expensive where much faster than discs. Hard drives were always the better option but still too expensive for consoles so they just kept increasing disc drive speeds.
The 360 / ps3 generation finally saw hard drives hit consoles but the sizes were too small to make installs mandatory. Some games forced it on the ps4 (the blu ray drive was slow) but none did on the 360. They hit a wall with the 8th generation though because games started requiring absolutely massive amounts of data on the fly and the disc drives speeds couldn’t really keep up. Installing to the hard drive became necessary to ensure games ran properly plus hard drives had finally become cheap enough to include in consoles at a reasonable price.
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