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theword on 10 October 2009
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heruamon said:
theword said:
If Natal is packaged with the 360, launch price is likely in the range of 400 - 450.

The recent $50 Elite rebates was a market test for MS. If consumer response was good, we can expect to see the drop make permanent soon. Some analysts expected such drop as early as Feb, Mar 2010. After that the $250 price will likey stay the same until 2011.

How much will Natal retail for when it launches is a big guess for everyone. We should not expect it to be packaged with the system for $299 however as this suggests Natal can be sold separately for $50, the price of a controller! This is too much wishful thinking.

Rather expect it to lauch separately for $150 - 250, putting the complete Natal Elite 360 package at $400 - $500. R&D cost for Natal is probably much more than most of us give it credit for. There are some cutting edge sci-fi like tech stuffed in there. Things like voice recognition, facial recognition, body gesture tracking and the associated AI, etc. are very difficult problems that MS and many others have been working on for more than a decade. So expect some of that R&D cost to be factored into Natal.

Sorry, but this makes no sense to be that M$ would launch EVERY 360 with Natal at $400-500, while PS3 will retail at $299 and Wii at $199.  They would effectively be using Sony's strategy this generation, and it didn't work at all...it is also the same strategy used last generation that didn't work.  If M$ launches every 360 with Natal, there's no way they price it at anything more than $299, imho.


I would guess that Sony's new motion controller will retail for $60 (same as the Wiimote + motion plus).    So effectively the PS3 with the new Sonymote controller will cost $360.   Two players will need to pay $120 bringing the cost to $420.  Three to four players can play Natal at the same time without the additional cost of several new motion controllers making it a better value from this perspective.

More importantly, Natal is the kind of technology that no one has put on the market before.  In some ways Natal is harder to do than doing a new console.   Want to make a faster next gen system?  throw in faster and more multi-chips.  Make sure it has the latest graphics sub component from ATI, NVDIA or Intel.  And don't forget to increase RAM size by at least four folds.... It is generally a known process that all the hardware manufacturer know how to do well.  

Natal is different.   Much of what make Natal work is not in the hardware but in the algorithms that run underneath.  You can't just throw in a couple state of the art multicore chips and hope that it knows what to do with 3D body movements captured from the camera.   Much much more R&D went on before Natal get to this point .  In making the demo for Milo and Kate, Peter Molyneux has said he was like a kid picking candy from a store, grabbing whatever is cool from many areas of MS tech research.

In short, we should not expect Natal to sell for the price of one or two Sonymotes. 

By the time Natal launches late 2010, there should be close to 45 millions 360 in homes.   If those folks want to have the Natal experience, then it would not be the whole $400, but rather $150 - 250 they need to invest.    For the new buyers, and I am stating the obvious, MS will have two options: 1) the stand alone Natal or 2) a package with both Natal and 360 systems.    I suspect that many new buyers will choose to buy the systems in two stages, 360 first, then Natal.