Microsoft released the pricing information for the Xbox 360 this week and many, many wallets will be much, much lighter come this November. The 360 will come in two flavors, the "Core System" for $299 that comes out of the box ready to play a game, and that's about it, and the regular old Xbox 360 for $399 that will let you connect to Live, play old Xbox games and see the HD shenanigans. Personally, I think the pricing strategy is somewhat shitty as all along they've been saying that hard drives and wireless controllers would be the rule of the day for all systems, but most likely that meant too much of a loss on each unit. Whatever. When you look at the combined price of the accessories you get with the 360, $100 is a steal over upgrading the Core System, a $210 dollar endeavor. Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll release this so that we can take advantage of Black Friday sales for accessories on the cheap, but I doubt that any retailers will give up the goods that easily. Just having the 360 in the stores will be enough to get people in there.
For me, the biggest issue becomes backwards compatibility. If the 360 has an impressive list of backward compatible games, then I'll buy one when it comes out and just put off purchasing any 360 games while I finish up whatever Xbox games are still lying around. If the backward compatibilty list is piss-poor, I'll have to evaluate my launch purchase decision. 400 bucks is a lot to spend and only get some puzzle game I've never heard of.
Decisions, decision.
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