Microsoft is Nuts
Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 4:21 pmMicrosoft announced the pricing for the X-Box 360 today and it is… disappointing. Basically there is a "core" system that has no hard drive, and a premium one with a lot of extra stuff you need anyway. I think MS needs to read up on their console history and go find some ex-sega people to ask about how well add on hardware works (it doesn’t). I am totally at a loss to understand why they wouldn’t put any hard drive at all in the core system. I could see them putting a small one in the core, and a bigger one in the premium, but none at all just hobbles the system. Either developers will never use it at all, which is most likely given past history, or there will be a lot of games that won’t play on the core system. I don’t even want to imagine the confusion that will cause when something like Halo 3 requires a $100 add on to little bobby’s console.
I can’t believe that MS just dropped the one feature that made them stand out. Even live will be next to useless without a hard drive to download extra content and patches to. I think Nintendo’s chances to make a market share comeback just went up quite a bit. At this point they don’t even have to do anything innovative. They just need to release a buffed up GC with wireless controllers, online play, and have it come in around $250 or less.