It may seem odd to us, but there was a very real possibility that the PlayStation 4 could have shipped without a hard drive.  Sony’s Andrew House told the Develop conference in Brighton that the inclusion of the component had caused him “sleepless nights.”
“The reason [having a hard drive or not] was such a large decision because it’s not just for launch but in it for the cycle,” explained Andrew. “It has massive implications for the business model over [a] long period of years. What was great was Mark [Cerny] advocated in a very succinct, natural way about what this would mean for developers and, by extension, the user experience.”
It turns out that Watch Dogs  may have been one of the deciding factors to include the hard drive.
“Watch Dogs is a title that needed 15GB cached on a very fast medium like a hard drive for the level the creators wanted it to be,” said Mark Cerny. “We couldn’t say the hard drive works for people but not everyone… We ultimately we had to make that decision.”
The added cost of the hard drive and eight gb of memory meant “it was pretty obvious for me something had to give”, and that was the PlayStation camera which was originally meant to ship with every console.
“It was another one of these points [that] were there in the financial pressures, but it had us think through the consumer proposition again,” said Andrew. “I think what Mark’s alluding to was, if we were making the platform much more about consumer choice than perhaps our previous platforms had been, then having the camera as an option was not a negative, but that’s offering people choice.”
Source: Digital Spy
mclarenrob2
Imagine if we would have had to buy the camera, it would have been widely criticized for having almost no use whatsoever, coming up to a year since release!
Cezar24
Keeping the HDD and losing the camera was a very good choice. Everyone uses the HDD, same can’t be said for the camera.