| Soundwave said: Yup this is what I see too. It will have a lot of the same Nintendo TVii stuff like the Wii U does, but the 720/PS4 will be more flexible and have more features (ie: play Blu-Ray movies, play all your video content, stream content to and from your smartphone and/or tablet, etc. etc. etc.). MS will take a $50-$60 loss/unit the first 6 months or so until mass production ramps up, not a big deal. Destiny (Bungie) and something from Epic will be the lead launch titles. It will be backed by the biggest marketing campaign in video game history. |
I don't think they'll go beyond a 2 year subscription and generally most things top out at 2 years for subsidised products like phones or 1 year with things like cable/internet etc. I do think however they can get it much cheaper than $299 I would say minimum you'll get the same $200 discount on the console with the $15 per month deal so the minimum price ought to be around $99-199 depending on the base price of their cheapest console. Sometime between now and the release of the Nextbox this year they'll turn that $15 per month subscription into more than just an extra big Live payment.
They released the Xbox 360 core for $299 + Memory card or about ~$340 U.S.D so considering the fact you can buy 64GB of 50MB/S flash memory for $40 retail they could easily ship with that as the minimum spec for the console at $299 w/o Kinect with say a base of 64GB of removeable storage. The total silicon budget is likely going to be less than the 500mm^2 the 360 shipped at and saving money on packaging/shipping and using commodity parts whenever possible should help too.
A 260mm^2 main die + say a 200mm^2 'interposer with 64MB of eSRAM/IO chip/ROP (South/Northbridge) with 8GB of stacked DDR4 leveraging development from both AMD and another 3rd party company for the interposer/DDR4 interface ought to be a cheap and effective design.
Tease.
