Sony made a smart move by slimming down the PlayStation 3 but more importantly, cutting the cost of the system. The public looks to have welcomed the changes with open arms because sales of the system increased as soon as it was released. However, before the announcement was made official during Gamescom in Germany last August, Sony was actually contemplating making this newest model, even smaller.

The news came straight from Sony’s executive VP of technology Masayuki Chatani, who spoke with the Japanese newspaper Nikkei, about the different challenges the company had to endure while designing the PS3 Slim. According to Mr. Chatani, the company actually talked about replacing the HDD with a flashdrive, or even go as far as saving data using cloud technology, where save data would have been on a server and not in your system. They even considered taking the power supply out of the system, and use a “power brick,” something the Xbox 360 includes, instead.

The reason they had these ambitious ideas, was to possibly attract “an even wider range of users.” But ultimately, they found a happy medium and decided on the current PS3 Slim model.

While I firmly believe cloud gaming to some extent is the future of this industry and to even entertainment as a whole, I don’t think the public is ready for that just yet. I think Sony has made the right decisions. But believe me when I say this: if Sony was already considering implementing a cloud service with the PS3, they have future plans for the technology, and perhaps they could take advantage on their next console.