Feature: 'QOTW Responses: Xbox 360 Pricing and Bundling?'

In today's main Gamasutra feature, with the Xbox 360 launch just around the corner and the industry still discussing Microsoft' recently announced multi-tier pricing strategy for its next-gen console, the latest Question of the Week asked of our audience of game professionals: "What do you think of the Xbox 360's launch pricing, and what are your views on Microsoft's multi-tiered Xbox 360 bundling strategy?" Responses from the industry were largely favorable on the price points, but less so on the bundling deals, with this measured response one of the highlights: "Wearing the developer hat, it sucks because, as always, we all need to target the lowest common denominator. Since game development is crossplatform, it's not worth spending development effort on peripherals. How many games support Sony's PS2 hard disk? It won't be quite _that_ bad; I estimate that 75% of 360 games will ignore the hard disk entirely. This in turn makes it a worse value proposition for the consumer, ensuring that it remains mostly unsupported. (Disclaimer: If some popular game engine or middleware makes use of the hard disk in some clever way that's unobtrusive to developers, then the hard disk will get used by a lot of games.) Wearing the business hat, yay, they're keeping the costs down for price-conscious consumers, which will expand the installed base and increase the sales of all our games. And the price of the console will probably come down faster than it did in this generation: Microsoft has been telling us that one of the obstructions to their lowering the price of the original Xbox has been that hard disks mostly get bigger and not cheaper as time goes on. I can see the first price reduction being $50 on the basic console, with the premium bundle staying at the same price but with a bigger hard disk. Bill Dugan, Torpex Games" You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).