XBox 360 Rumours - Price Cuts, Release Dates and more... Options

[The Ghost of Inept Pig]

Taken from Team XBox

The first info that comes from that post claims the price of the Xbox 360 Premium Edition will drop €90 (that’s 110 USD) by the end of October, with the Core package being lowered €80 (100 USD).

The second item on that list of rumors claims Gears of War will launch in the last week of October, backed up by a huge worldwide marketing campaign. That doesn’t sound like a crazy rumor at all and it could be more of a smart prediction than an insider gossip. First, there’s the new Nov.1 release date that both EB and GameStop posted last week and second there’s the fact that Gears seems to be the only shooter that Microsoft has on their sleeves to counter attack the PlayStation 3 launch since nobody expect Halo 3 to arrive this year; which takes us to the next rumor.

According to this gossip, Halo 3 won’t arrive until March, 2007 with an official announcement happening at next month’s E3. Again, this could certainly be true as everything sounds realistic. The insider also claims a sequel to Kameo is also in the works and that Microsoft is working to secure an exclusive of “an urban game”, which can be interpreted as the next GTA game.

Now moving onto hardware peripherals, the post at MeriStation claims the HD DVD drive will cost approximately 95 euros (that’s 115 dollars) and it is scheduled for release next September. There is no mention of a HDMI cable and the post only mentions USB 2.0 connectivity with the console. With the first internal HD DVD drives for PC costing around $120, this rumors sound realistic too, although we think that a $150 price sounds more reasonable for an external HD DVD drive as the one the Xbox 360 will use.

Next, the rumor claims a 100GB hard drive will be available as a peripheral but won’t replace the hard drive included with the Premium Edition. No release date or price is mentioned.

Finally in what concerns to hardware peripherals, the Xbox 360 camera (referred in the post as the “My Eye On You” web cam) is rumored to launch in September with a price of 47 euros (58 dollars) or bundled with a game at 77 euros (95 dollars). We guess those would be games that make use of the camera features. These prices sound credible but with an Xbox 360 camera costing as much as a third-party game, there better be good games for this peripheral or it will sell less than the Nintendo 64DD…

There's also more to be read and digested, but I'm not surprised to see the price drop news