Natal possibly to be priced around $69,99

[Squilliam]

JaggedSac said:

Orca_Azure said:
i still think Natal will be monstrously priced. 69.99 is how much some fancy keyboards cost- a motion sensing piece of equipment like that just seems to be too cheap at 70 dollars

Keyboards have huge profit margins as well.  M$ might want to have huge profit margins on this thing, but I doubt it.  They probably want to break even and have it help push more consoles and more software.  Do you know what exactly the components of the Natal are?  Without that knowledge it is hard to even speculate.  All we have to go on is someone saying their motion sensing camera could release to retail at $69.

Lets see, it has a video processor to compress the video stream (otherwise it wouldn't work in real time with USB) a high(ish) quality array microphone, a camera, a depth finder and years of software development. It would cost at minimum probably closer to $100 than $50 to make. So adding ~25% for retail margins would have us at a device which breaking even on the marginal costs of the unit itself (not the software/development costs) would cost at least $100 at retail.

Personally im expecting it to cost somewhere between $125-175 which isn't too far away from their highest priced accessory, the 120GB HDD.