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JaggedSac on 03 June 2009
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Squilliam said:
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.

They could probably lump software/development costs in R&D and not attempt to recuperate that from the hardware sales.  Voice recognition, facial recognition, etc have been being researched at M$ for a while and not in concert with this project.  So there was definitely some sharing going on there.

So you have a video camera plus high quality array mic, which is currently in an EyeToy which retails for $40 bucks.  So take %25 off that.

You have the infrared projector and processor.  I have no idea how much that would cost.

So a you have a product that takes at minimum $30 to manufacture, plus whatever the infrared projecter and processor costs.  Those could cost $70, but in bulk I doubt it.  So $100 is possible in my mind.