Disclaimer: I have no inside information whatosever. None. Zero.
So anyway, considering the fact that there are now two "exclusive" Xbox 360s with a 250 gig HDD (which is currently unavailable as an a la carte accessory) with a new $399.99 price tag, what does everyone think of the likelihood of a new model? It makes sense that they would introduce a new model this way, particular in the case of Final Fantasy XIII which I think was an important "get" for Microsoft, even if the Xbox 360 version is inferior to the swapless PS3 version (I'm not being a fanboy here, I have both systems and don't really give a shit which does better than the other).
250 gigs is a lot of space. Considering the expanding size of games and the fact that DVD9 just cannot compete with Blu-Ray for capacity. Factor in the popularity of stuff like the Xbox Live Marketplace and PSN for movies/music/videos and you have a situation where increasing and cheap hard drive space is important. It's important for Microsoft to push more hard drive space out there for its system, because more space equals more digital purchases on their marketplace, which is something they seem to have finally fully embraced.
Also, I could see them retiring the Xbox 360 Arcade system. For the past year, various retailers have been offering instant rebates/gift cards on the Arcade systems. Almost every week, you could find a sale that included a $10 or $20 gift card (or something) with the purchase of a new Arcade system.
It was a mistake, in my opinion, to ever release an Xbox 360 model without a hard drive. It caused many problems in the beginning, problems that Microsoft was able to admittedly mitigate, but I think those problems are starting to catch up with the general media-centric, digital download thrust of the gaming market.
Anyway, considering the release of two exclusive 250-gig systems, I could see Microsoft announcing and releasing a new Xbox 360 with a 250 gig hard drive and with a new pricing structure...maybe $250 for the current Elite, $350 for the 250 gig model, and either $150 for the Arcade console, or just dropping it completely. I think it would be well-timed, too, if they did something like this before NATAL is released. It could reinvigorate the Xbox 360 market somewhat. Or, at the very least, it would call extra attention to the console.
Thoughts?
Posts
Pretty much this.
The alleged shots of the new motherboard are out there, showing a slimmed down model with connections for an internal hard drive. In fact the new update allowing usb storage seems to be in preparation for this since those same shots show no memory card slots.
psst
$129.99
Whoa, when did that come out?
uhhh, middle of the month? I'm stuck between "Well it's cheaper than the 120g started" and "but I can just swap out 16G thumb-drives after the update so it doesn't really matter"
Didn't it just kind of show up on Amazon one day? I remember Microsoft pledging that it wasn't going to be sold separately when they first started bundling them.
I've got a bad case of lovin' you.
I'm feeling the same way. Paying over 50 cents a gig is really annoying, especially for a non SSD drive... but I can't even install anything with my little 20 gig drive. I don't have any 16 gig flash drives lying around either so that would cost me about 60 dollars for 32 gigs of flash that I wouldn't have much use for. Flash would be the priciest solution.
Argh MS. Why do you want me to not buy more of your online content.
edit: well it includes a transfer kit... still not a good value.