• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

[RUMOR] Paul Thurrott: Xbox 720 is expensive: $500 or $300 for sub model, 5/21 Unveil

I can see $500 for both consoles. I really think that's a fair price. Considering that they are new and true next gen unlike Wii U. I was hoping they would be less though so that Wii U would go to $199.
 
We can debate which system is worth the price but at this point though doesn't everybody expect to pay between 500-600 bucks for the next gen of Sony and Microsoft systems? I know I am not expecting either system to sell for less than $500.00

It will sell for less that $500.....they will be $499.99
 

Ensoul

Member
You obviously missed all the "what price you would pay" threads.
Most people expect the consoles to be under 500.

I did miss it. Obviously not everybody can afford to pay over 500 bucks for a system (including myself right now) but if/when the systems launches at $500+ plus people will complain but ultimately both systems will sell millions of units. I also believe that it will be tough to find a next gen system; meaning unless you get them early you will not be able to walk into a store and buy one or find one online for the normal retail price.
 

ascii42

Member
Can someone here explain why they ever thought the Xbox 720 would have BC?

We have known it's going to be x86 for a while now. How in the world would it have BC?

360 had BC with some XBOX games, and the original XBOX was x86. If the 720 were powerful enough, it could emulate the 360.
 

Z3M0G

Member
What if "always online required" is to cut off players who stop paying their subscription fees (if they go with the possible $300+sub option).

Has this been speculated/discussed yet?
 
What if "always online required" is to cut off players who stop paying their subscription fees (if they go with the possible $300+sub option).

Has this been speculated/discussed yet?

I dunno, but this would be a perfect avenue to do it. Publishers have wanted games to be "services" for a while now, so this is playing right into their hands.

I can't believe that this is where games are heading - and we want it that way, apparently.
 

andthebeatgoeson

Junior Member
Let's not pretend that people were happy about Sony's pricing. Lets not also pretend like they had good sales because of it. They had shit sales because of it and it was $600 because Blu-ray was incredibly expensive at the time. What's the excuse now? Sony's $599 blunder was exactly that, a blunder. That doesn't mean you become a corporate apologist when MS tries to do the same thing 7 years later.

Sony's $599 wasn't them setting the standard of what a console should cost, far from it. And the real reason Microsoft was the winner for so long is because they had the cheapest console. And what happened when Sony's machine finally became around the same price as the Xbox? Sales became more even. A $499 console launch will equal another slow trickle of sales just like it did before.

360 started out at $300 and $400. But let's be real, $400 was the price because you need a HDD. But not $500. That won't fly this time.
Don't forget MS took awhile to really take off. I remember being confident in the Wii because of how slow the 360 was selling. It took forever to sell 10 million. And it's price wad much better than this rumor. And it wasn't selling against any next gen competitor for a long time. Kind of like this gen is going. Nobody feels confident with the Wii u at these rates. What if Sony and MS
launch at $400 or more and under sell the Wii u numbers?

You won't be able to stand this board.
 

Ensoul

Member
Let's not pretend that people were happy about Sony's pricing. Lets not also pretend like they had good sales because of it. They had shit sales because of it and it was $600 because Blu-ray was incredibly expensive at the time. What's the excuse now? Sony's $599 blunder was exactly that, a blunder. That doesn't mean you become a corporate apologist when MS tries to do the same thing 7 years later.

Sony's $599 wasn't them setting the standard of what a console should cost, far from it. And the real reason Microsoft was the winner for so long is because they had the cheapest console. And what happened when Sony's machine finally became around the same price as the Xbox? Sales became more even. A $499 console launch will equal another slow trickle of sales just like it did before.

360 started out at $300 and $400. But let's be real, $400 was the price because you need a HDD. But not $500. That won't fly this time.

Good post. I remember reading that the ps3 was 1000 bucks to make because of the blu-ray player and that Sony was taking a $400 bath every time one was sold. I hope you're correct about the price.

I am wondering though if they do have a $500-600 tag they will spin it by saying "Well if you built a computer with the same parts as we are using for the ps4 and durango it would cost your between 800-1000 bucks.
 
If 720 is always online, and Microsoft charges for online (live), that means you have to purchase live regardless. Why would I purchase the $500 non-subscription model if I still have to pay for live anyway?
 
Can someone here explain why they ever thought the Xbox 720 would have BC?

We have known it's going to be x86 for a while now. How in the world would it have BC?

It was listed in that leaked PDF from last year, which also showed that the console would essentially include the 360 CPU/GPU internally. Microsoft spent a lot of effort making sure they could shrink down/cost reduce the 360 over it's lifespan, and one potential benefit is being able to have BC hardware included at a (relatively) cheap price.

Also, we now live in a marketplace dominated by smart phones and tablets, where people expect their apps to work when upgrading. Especially when it comes to digital downloads. Sony had to decide between keeping exotic hardware for BC, or moving to a more developer focused console. Durango may potentially not have to make that choice.
 

Alx

Member
If 720 is always online, and Microsoft charges for online (live), that means you have to purchase live regardless. Why would I purchase the $500 non-subscription model if I still have to pay for live anyway?

Er, no, you probably wouldn't need a gold account for the "always online" part... just like you can connect your current 360 to the MS servers as a Silver member without paying anything.
 
Am I the only one that's fine with this?

I buy 3-4 titles a year. I don't buy used games. Ever.
I always want to play online, always have internet.
I am all for the move to home entertainment (streaming, cable and games all in one).
If they convince me enough to take my dollars from Apple and Roku, then +1 MS for a true entertainment system + getting my games on with the same thing.
 
I'm curious about the rumor of a $99 360 alongside the 720. Would that be such a good idea? Wouldn't people say screw it, and grab that instead of buying the 720 at $300 or $500?
 

KingKong

Member
Can someone here explain why they ever thought the Xbox 720 would have BC?

We have known it's going to be x86 for a while now. How in the world would it have BC?

Yeah I don't know, Microsoft knows they'll be able to sell old Halo and Gears games for $15 in their online store
 

ascii42

Member
If 720 is always online, and Microsoft charges for online (live), that means you have to purchase live regardless. Why would I purchase the $500 non-subscription model if I still have to pay for live anyway?

Two things:
1) Probably won't necessarily have to pay for Live. I don't currently, but my 360 is connected to the Internet for getting updates, XBLA games, and DLC.

2) We'll have to wait for pricing to see if it'll make sense. Presumably you'll have to pay an extra amount on top of the price of Gold for the subscription. Odds are, that'll add up to more than buying the system outright+ paying for Live.

I'm curious about the rumor of a $99 360 alongside the 720. Would that be such a good idea? Wouldn't people say screw it, and grab that instead of buying the 720 at $300 or $500?

Some people will, yeah. But that's no different than any other generation. PS2 still sold millions up until a couple years ago.
 
So let me get this straight : $500, no bc, always online AND they expect me to pay them money for live? PFTTT HAHAHA. Well this certainly boosted my shitty day.
 

Dipswitch

Member
Am I the only one that's fine with this?

I buy 3-4 titles a year. I don't buy used games. Ever.
I always want to play online, always have internet.
I am all for the move to home entertainment (streaming, cable and games all in one).
If they convince me enough to take my dollars from Apple and Roku, then +1 MS for a true entertainment system + getting my games on with the same thing.

Do you ever rent games? Or borrow them from a mate/family?

If so, you're SOL.
 
Am I the only one that's fine with this?

I buy 3-4 titles a year. I don't buy used games. Ever.
I always want to play online, always have internet.
I am all for the move to home entertainment (streaming, cable and games all in one).
If they convince me enough to take my dollars from Apple and Roku, then +1 MS for a true entertainment system + getting my games on with the same thing.

If you don't buy used games, I assume you also don't trade games in? If you keep your games are you ok with the idea that at some point in the future those games become unplayable when the 720's servers go down?

There is nothing about unifying streaming, cable, and games that would require a constant internet connection.
 

Vlodril

Member
I do not understand why everyone keeps repeating that they have good internet. The problem will be not from your internet but from Ms servers. Sim city and Diablo 3 sucked for that reason. I do not even want to imagine the strain that will happen at times and you WILL be forbidden to play if they truly require a connection every 3 minutes(although i am not convinced).
 

blackflag

Member
Am I the only one that's fine with this?

I buy 3-4 titles a year. I don't buy used games. Ever.
I always want to play online, always have internet.
I am all for the move to home entertainment (streaming, cable and games all in one).
If they convince me enough to take my dollars from Apple and Roku, then +1 MS for a true entertainment system + getting my games on with the same thing.

None of that requires "always online" None of that requires them to kick you out of your single player game if you aren't connected for more than 3 minutes (rumor).
 
All I want is for XBox live arcade games to work. That's it.

If physical discs aren't backwards compatible live games won't be either.

After all a physical disc is just digital media stored in physical form. They can port it, it's just not a guarantee. The good news though is that all original Xbox games should be supported. Their is no reason to not have backwards compatibility with the original at this point.

Hey guys.. Guess who else will be launching at $500? :)

Dreamcast 2?
 

blackflag

Member
If physical discs aren't backwards compatible live games won't be either.

After all a physical disc is just digital media stored in physical form. They can port it, it's just not a guarantee. The good news though is that all original Xbox games should be supported. Their is no reason to not have backwards compatibility with the original at this point.

Hmm ok I wasn't sure if they were coded differently or easier to enable BC for.

None of it matters if the rumors are true. I'll keep my 360 and roll with PS4. I hope they aren't true though so I can have both.
 

Piggus

Member
$500 is not the same as $600. Both consoles will be in that $500 range at launch, there's no way around it.

So you know the BOM of both systems? $500 is a lot of money for the specs offered. That applies to both systems... I'm not sure why so many people have this notion that a $500 system is acceptable or unsurprising when the PS2 was $300 and the 360 was $400, the latter of which was seen as pretty expensive in the first place. Inflation isn't THAT bad... $500 is still way too much for a next gen system. It's not that much better than the 599 US DOLLARS fiasco, and the ONLY reason the PS3 cost that much was because of the insane costs of new tech and R&D. Cell and the Blu-Ray drive were particularly expensive. There is nothing in these new systems that drive up the costs the way Blu-Ray drove up the cost of PS3. Nothing. Not even the GDDR5 is that expensive. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if PS4 is the most cost-effect system Sony has ever made due to the lack of ridiculous custom hardware.

The only way I could see the next Xbox being $500 is

1. Kinect 2.0 costs a lot of money to make

2. Microsoft isn't willing to take a hit on every system sold initially and wants to be profitable from the beginning

3. A combination of the two


Everybody was saying the same shit about the Vita before Sony announced the price. "Looks expensive! $399!!11 There's no way this thing costs less than that!" I guess people don't remember that using off the shelf hardware results in a less expensive system.


Because you've seen the BoM and details? mind sharing them?


Common sense suggests that with the current leaked specs, it would not be an expensive system to produce. They could easily make a profit at $500. The question is how much does Kinect 2.0 cost to build?
 

FStop7

Banned
Not from what I've played.

The Xbox 1 games I tried to play on the 360:

Halo 1 had bad framerate issues.

KOTOR had audio drops

Forza had bad audio drops, stuttering, and engine noises that would "freeze" at a certain point and not stop unless I totally quit the game.
 

Zinthar

Member
360 had BC with some XBOX games, and the original XBOX was x86. If the 720 were powerful enough, it could emulate the 360.

As others have mentioned, next Xbox is not powerful to do this. Remember that the 360 was pretty advanced for console tech when it came out in 2005 -- with a beefy GPU that, to my knowledge, was the first mass-market graphics chip to feature unified shaders (it actually had as much raw shading power as high-end single-GPU PC cards of its release date). The 8800 GTX came out 11 months later as the first PC card to use them, and its performance completely dominated the PC market for the next year.

Durango is running a low-power CPU. Jaguar's predecessor, Bobcat, which has half as many cores and probably slightly worse efficiency per clock, scores a 27 in SysMark 2012. If you assume perfect efficiency gains in doubling the cores (which is unreleastically optimistic in games), you'd get a 54. Hell, bump it to 60 or 70 for the architecture gains. That's less than half the performance of an Intel i3-3220 (an Ivy Bridge dual-core w/ hyperthreading), which scores 145. There will be another generation of CPU advancement that comes out before Durango, putting it even lower down the rung.

More importantly, Durango is packing what, at 1.2 TFLOPS, would charitably be considered a mid-range GPU... from last year -- although it will fall further behind by the time it actually comes out, and will probably be roughly the same as whatever AMD PC card is priced at $99, except that Durango will have the ESRAM to help somewhat.

Relative to the 360 at its time of release, Durango will be fairly weak hardware tech by the time it hits stores. Safe to say that there's no chance in hell that Jaguar can handle software emulation of Xenon.
 

Karma

Banned
They might have a $499 unit but they will also have a cheaper sku at $299 or $399. The big thing would be $99 for the 360. That would be a monster during Christmas.
 
The Xbox 1 games I tried to play on the 360:

What we have seems to work well:
NFL2K5
An Incredible Hulk game
A Spiderman game
Lord of the Rings: The Third Age
Loons

That's all that remains of the original Xbox game list in our library, but it's decent. It's sad to see that the 1st party games had issues. They really shouldn't have.
 

Zinthar

Member
I'm playing San Andreas on the 360, runs perfectly. BC on 360 is pretty clutch for games like Kotor and JSRF.

KOTOR's emulation is awful. You get a loud screeching noise that sounds like your speakers are exploding that plays at random, and all too frequent, intervals. It's bad enough to render the game unplayable, as it sometimes occurs so frequently that it's nearly continuous.
 

FStop7

Banned
What we have seems to work well:
NFL2K5
An Incredible Hulk game
A Spiderman game
Lord of the Rings: The Third Age
Loons

That's all that remains of the original Xbox game list in our library, but it's decent. It's sad to see that the 1st party games had issues. They really shouldn't have.

I think it was really ambitious for them to have attempted BC in the 360 given all the changes in architecture, but I would personally prefer they skip it entirely on the Durango unless performance is practically indistinguishable from the 360.
 

calder

Member
Ahhh, memories of paying $650 for my launch 60gb PS3. After tax with a bluray and a game it was over $850 I think.

Lol not likely to do that again. And happily I can't imagine the prices for any console will be that bad this time around.
 
If you don't buy used games, I assume you also don't trade games in? If you keep your games are you ok with the idea that at some point in the future those games become unplayable when the 720's servers go down?

There is nothing about unifying streaming, cable, and games that would require a constant internet connection.
The fact is, I enjoy games for 3-6 months. Rarely will I play a game for longer than that, and usually only because DLC has come out. I am not a minority either.
though it seems I am a minority on GAF

If, years down the road, the servers are shut down and I cannot play. Darn. I'm sure there will be better things down the road. I am not necessarily completely for this model, just that it wouldn't be a huge negative to convince me to purchase a PS4. I know quite a few people who would agree with me, but just aren't as vocal about it. I don't trade in games, I don't borrow games from friends. If I like a game, I support the developers.
 
The fact is, I enjoy games for 3-6 months. Rarely will I play a game for longer than that, and usually only because DLC has come out. I am not a minority either.
though it seems I am a minority on GAF

If, years down the road, the servers are shut down and I cannot play. Darn. I'm sure there will be better things down the road. I am not necessarily completely for this model, just that it wouldn't be a huge negative to convince me to purchase a PS4. I know quite a few people who would agree with me, but just aren't as vocal about it. I don't trade in games, I don't borrow games from friends. If I like a game, I support the developers.

So then what do you do with your old games? Set them on a shelf? Throw them away? I am curious. I hold no ill will towards you for how you want to buy and play games; it just seems strange to me. I play a lot of games online, but I also play games like Valkyria Chronicles or Bioshock that I would want to keep and revisit down the line in the same way I will still fire up my Dreamcast, or N64, or NES.
 

Darkmakaimura

Can You Imagine What SureAI Is Going To Do With Garfield?
Hmm Washington Post seems to think it's going to be OUT by the end of next month?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...e4a27a-a057-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_story.html

"Gamers, get your wallets ready. According to reports from The Verge and Microsoft-centric blogger Paul Thurrott, Microsoft is gearing up to release its next-generation Xbox by the end of next month."
ME37z85.jpg
 

Dipswitch

Member
Hmm Washington Post seems to think it's going to be OUT by the end of next month?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...e4a27a-a057-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_story.html

"Gamers, get your wallets ready. According to reports from The Verge and Microsoft-centric blogger Paul Thurrott, Microsoft is gearing up to release its next-generation Xbox by the end of next month."

Well considering the people/reports he quoted said no such thing, this is a clear case of misreading basic information. Console will be announced next month, not released.
 

Respawn

Banned
LOL. Or maybe it is an incomplete sentence that has been taken out of context. Like: "must be internet-connected to use... all social and entertainment applications".

Or they just don't want to admit it. The damage control on this system is beyond Jedi control.
 
Top Bottom