I agree with this 100%

I can see them launching at $129 though with limited release. Then running specials at $99 and eventually dropping if build cost warrants.

It better be close to $50, cause all these rumors of $150 and $189 etc.

$150/$189 vs $50 =/= competitive

Sounds like they are having  a hard time deciding if they want to take a lost on this thing or sell it at profit.

This is spin zone now.  What do people expect Microsoft to say here?  They are going to talk great value, irregardless of the price.  They aren't revealing ANYTHING at this time. 

The fact they did not reveal Kinect's price shows that Microsoft had no idea how the reactions to their Kinect presentation might be.

They were aware that reactions might be negative, so instead of already deciding on a certain price tag, they decided it was better to check out the reactions from the gamers and the mainstream media and then decide on the price.

I guess for us gamers that's good news, the negative reactions will make Microsoft lower Kinect's price. $189 should be off the table once and for all, and most people even say that $149 is way too much. I think it will be $99, that's the price most people say is the maximum they would pay, and it would indeed be a "competative price" as the Move bundle is $99 as well.

No it doesn't. There are more plausable explanations for Natal pricing not being announced at E3. The most obvious reason is the exact same reason why they don't announce price cuts up to the last minute and why they didn't announce the Xbox 360 redesign and price cut until the conference.

There were good reasons for not not announcing the price, not that it wasn't a disappointment that the issue was completely avoided.

It all depends upon their release strategy when the device debuts. Do they favor rapid adoption rates in an attempt to ride a second wave of initial interest in the Xbox platform, or are they more focused on keeping the division profitable?

Production costs of the actual unit itself aside, there are still things to recoup from the R&D of the device and the marketing effort going into selling the public on the device. These are far from invisible costs.

But if they really want to keep the add-on "competitive," they will have to consider a $99 MSRP, due to Move bundles, even though Kinect is a one-time single purchase as opposed to Wii or Move controllers. Extra controllers have always been a good revenue stream for console manufacturers and with Kinect, MS doesn't have this extra source.

A $149 price would be an attempt to offset that advantage and I could see their PR take on this being a competitve price by comparing it to the price of a Move starter kit with an additional controller. Not entirely unreasonable, but it's still $149; almost the price of a console (or the price of the current inventory clearing discounted Arcade). 

Of course if they would prefer to just skip the comparatives and just boil things down to the one factor most consumers will look at in deciding WHEN they want to adopt, then they should go with a sub-$100 price to draw in a healthy amount of buyers with a casual interest (which is really the demographic that Kinect is targeting rather than the core audience based upon what they showed at the conference), eat their losses on initial investment and recoup with initial soft sales.

$60 for most of those initial titles seems a bit high considering the fast turnaround time/lower budget appearance, so who knows. A lot of people will buy them regardless for the lack of anything better to play with Kinect. It's not like people will be paying $149 just for voice and gesture commands while using Dashboard or watching media.

My guess is that Microsoft wants the price to be less than $149.

But that right now, that is projected US pricepoint.

I doubt that the largest gaming retailer (Gamestop), the largest big box electronic retailer (Best Buy) and the biggest mass market retailer (Wal Mart) would all post the same price point without some inside knowledge.

Mike from Morgantown

Me being a Nintendo fan was thinking about buying a 360 and a big part of it was because of Kinect. The price of $150 is a lot of $ and I wouldn't pay that much for Kinect. The most I would pay for Kinect is about $100 to be honest.

Compared to Move's pricing, $149 could be considered competitive.  Compared to the Wii, however...