If you’re considering investing in an Xbox 360 you might want to hold out for a little while.
GameIndustry.biz reports that Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has put his industry analyst hat on once more to predict that Microsoft will be offering some seriously attractive bundles later this year.
“At a minimum, we anticipate the introduction of a more feature-packed Xbox 360 as the standard SKU in late 2010 (likely with a 250GB hard drive) at the same $299 price point,” he said in a research note.
This isn’t the first mention of a potential Xbox 360 hardware revision recently. As I posted a couple of weeks ago, Joystiq acquired images from a Chinese tech forum that were alleged to be a slimmed-down version of the Xbox 360 motherboard.
Next came a quote from Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer referring to “more form factors in the future,” then add a recent Microsoft job posting for an Xbox 360 Motherboard Design Engineer to the mix and Pachter’s claim begins to seem more than viable.
Pachter told investors, “It is far more likely that we will see a slim version of the Xbox 360 with a 250 GB hard drive and with Project Natal bundled into the box while maintaining the $299 price point; especially if Sony does not lower the price of the PS3 by the time Natal and Sony’s Move controllers launch in the fall.”
The later part of last year saw Sony introduce a slimmer version of the PlayStation 3 and along with a new marketing campaign, they managed to hugely improve public interest in their console.
As the Xbox 360 has been on the market now for almost 5 years, it would make sense for Microsoft to take a similar approach to streamlining their console to coincide with the launch of Project Natal this winter.
This is all guess work of course, but let’s hope Pachter’s crystal ball’s on the money.
It all seems particularly feasible to me – what do you think?
Please leave your comments below…
