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Retailer Lists 360 Upgrade Pack
Games retailer GameStop has listed a $99 hardware upgrade pack for Xbox 360 owners.
The "60GB Live Pack," as listed by GameStop, includes a 60GB hard drive, headset, three month Live Gold subscription and an Ethernet cable to transfer files from a users' old hard drive.
Buying the upgrade kit would essentially bring a low-end Xbox 360 up to the same hardware level as a mid-range Pro model, which retails for $299.
The GameStop ad lists a release date of November 4 for U.S. buyers.
I don't think that MS knew when it began manufacturing the Arcade system that such a download would necessitate a larger HD. it seems to completely negate the saving of buying the Arcade system, and the reason people would buy the arcade is because its cheap, and who could blame them at such a time.
I think that both MS and Sony have made big errors with the specs of their machines, and have been especially too stingy with the specs of the hard drives. If I was to buy a new 120 HD for my Xbox 360 it would cost me around £100. I can buy a normal 500 sata drive for half that! Madness!
I still think the HDD is too expensive. This is better. I might actually get this. I have 85 dollars credit at gamestop..... so maybe. I'd rather get more games though. I already have the 20 gig, so I don't NEED this, but so much of the new features of NXE like installing games won't be put to use unless I get the bigger HDD.
So the 20 gig is actually only 13 gig.... What is the actual useable space on the 60 gig?
The strategy seems to be working... sell as many bare bones consoles as you can (at a very attractive price), Then produce services/content that can only be enjoyed with an upgrade, make that upgrade easy, accessible and voila!
Thats going to give MS the win over Sony...
after all $200+$100 does not equal $300 (and im not being sarcastic).
The beautiful thing about their strategy is if you want to JUST play games and that's it, the bare bones system will work out the box just as well as the elite does. You will just be missing some features that can be considered optional (like leather in a car, a 6 disc changer instead of a 1 disc, etc). If you want live, or an HDD for game installs and other content you can upgrade, otherwise, your copy of GTAIV or CoD4 will work with the $199 360 out the box just as well as Sony's $399 PS3 will. Now not only do you have an extra 200 bucks, you can get the 60 gig HDD with a headset (only 20 gigs short of the PS3 and the PS3 does not come with a headset) and still have roughly enough $$ to buy 2 games, not to mention the 5 live arcade games and 1 free retail game that's bundled with it this holiday. An arcade unit, 5 (decent) live arcade games, 3 retail games, a headset all for the price of a PS3 with no games (are they still bundling Drake with the PS3?). Ok, I'm done.
So, you would be saving essentially 14 dollars by buying the arcade unit then picking up this pack. You get one free month of Xbox live with a premium 360, so you're getting the additional 2 months (7 bucks a month if you were to buy live on a monthly basis) for free. 100 bucks for 60 gig, headset, and 3 months of live is a good buy considering the 20 gig used to be 100 by itself (it's about time they shed some $$ of the darn HDDs).
And you get a memory unit with the arcade but not with the premium. So buying an arcade and the hard drive pack looks like a very good option.
I forgot to mention that.
Thanks!