But how well will it play Halo Reach?

SEPT. 15, 2010 • Microsoft Corp. acknowledged that its 4GB Xbox 360 Slim had a problem with some multiplayer features of Halo Reach. The game is Microsoft’s primary lead-in to the fall sales period, and drove $200 million in worldwide sales its first day in release. On the 4GB Slim, co-operative multiplayer modes will not function as the game will request access to a hard drive, and will ignore the available system memory.

Impact: There are more different Xbox 360 SKUs in consumers homes than we care to count.  The recently released Slim SKUs included one with a 250 GB hard drive and another with only 4 GB of onboard memory.  The issue with Halo Reach is limited only to the later SKU and only to co-op multiplayer.  While co-op is definitely popular, it still ranks behind singleplayer and online multiplayer modes.  So the inability to play co-op Halo Reach on the 4GB Xbox 360 Slim may appear to be a major gaff on Microsoft’s flagship game franchise, the fact is most Halo Reach gamers probably have an Xbox 360 with a hard drive.   This significantly diminishes the damage this may have otherwise caused.  Nevertheless, DFC has long argued that multiple console SKUs are likely to cause more and more of these issues.