Phil Spencer has revealed that a “real” discussion took place after showing the Xbox One at E3 if the Xbox One should be released with an optical Blu-ray drive. In the end it was decided that the drive should stay as many players are faced with limited bandwidth and games continue to grow in size so much that download them could create issues, especially for those that broadband bandwidth caps per month.

While this might seem like a big deal, to us the release of the Xbox One without the Blu-ray drive would have been the kiss of death for the console. At the time that Microsoft was considering this, was the same time that the company was under serious fire over the DRM policies that they planned to enforce with the release of the Xbox One.

Even with the company including the Blu-ray optical drive, I don’t think we have to tell anyone that the installation of the games on to the hard drive is a dreadful experience for the largest titles. While you can start playing titles when they have reached a certain point in the installation, the install process is slow and that I guess is to be expected when you are dealing with data sizes in the tens of gigabytes. Still it does take a long time, and so long in fact we are only wonder would it would be like to have to download a 40GB game and wait for it to get to the point where it is playable.

Speaking of installing games on the Xbox One, the lack of available hard drive space on the 500GB hard drive is already closing in on being an issue for many. It is a good thing that they don’t have a free space indicator as people would be complaining more about it than they already are. We have to think that the USB 3.0 hard drive storage ability has to be high on the list of things that Microsoft need to make sure are in the next update. It will be quite a mess we predict for Microsoft if it is not.