Natal will cost under £50, says report News

That is a lot cheaper than I would expect to have paid. If you work for MS don't read this next bit: I probably would have been happy to pay the best part of £100, to be honest

I thought Epic was one of those developers that was doing games for Natal too? Although maybe that was more of an intention, rather than actually having something specific in development.

Cant be true, great news if it is.

Given the price of the wireless adapter, i'd be stunned if they can release this it at this price point. I'm more than happy to be proved wrong though!

I'd also have been happy to pay a bit more if there is a strong software lineup and support for it on release.

That sounds waaaaaay too cheap.

Altitude2K, Epic is developer not a publisher.

I'm not sure about the wisdom of letting Microsoft have a camera in my living room.

That would be a great price but it might difficult to get one at launch. The demand at the price could make it the hottest new gadget for late 2010

That's quite a late release. There may be a few surprises by Sony or Nintendo at that point already.

In other, although related news, the games for Natal will be shockingly bad.
If I'm wrong I will be genuinely surprised.

Makes sense to use a low price, if they don't want to see it flop.

And even then, making an "extension" successful is never easy. Look at the WMP, it's only 20€, and still it hasn't seen much use between developers. Same for the BB, despite there being 23 millions of those things out there, not too many games use it properly.

MS needs to find a way to make Natal a "requirement", or it's never gonna reach its full potential. Launching it together with their next console might be a good idea, but I don't think that's in their plans.

didn't that analyst fella 'Patcher' reckon something like this? I happen to think he's got it the wrong way round but who knows.

I was expecting it to be £100; but this is brilliant. Nice to see Microsoft not being totally monolithic for once.

Fantastic news if true! Would be an impulse purchase for definite.

Until I see a working game my personal jury is out on whether this will ultimately sink or swim, as with Sony's wand.

Hard drives and wireless adapters are sold to people already locked into MS' system. Natal is about encouraging new users to join the party.

Pricing strategies of the two are obviously completely different, and I don't think it's that surprising if Natal ends up costing not much more than an official gamepad.

this 50quid pricepoint isnt exactly confirmed by microsoft though...but it'll be interesting to know how much it cost them to make each one

So a console-changing device is £30-50, but a slightly improved wireless adapter is $100?

What's going on in Microsoft's marketing department?

hopefully that would included thier version of Wii Sports/breakout clone too

Wonder what that 14 games number mean, could easily be like all those games having the sixaxis logo on the back because they use it for a tiny gimmick.

Has to be a low price, regardless of any loss being made. If this doesn't get into loads of front rooms, devs will not make games for it.

@ mcmonkeyplc

Read your comment, then read my original comment again ;)

I reckon this is a great marketing ploy: leak a rumour that it's £50, to get more people interested and considering buying it. Then when it's confirmed at £70-100 (after all £50 was a ridiculous rumour) those people who wouldn't have normally considered it at that price will have read about it and become excited about it (as they thought it might be £50) so will buy it at £70-100.

Actually, that sounds like rubbish, but I'll leave it here for posterity...

It really has to be this cheap if they are hoping for existing owners to pick up whilst pushing it to the mass market. Any more expensive and it will just become HD DVD external drive, or Xbox Live Vision.*


*(I do have both of those things though)

@Altitude2K, yeah you know it's a dev but this article just mentioned publishers not devs :)

Also people need to realise the difference between POUNDS STERLING denoted by the £ symbol and US DOLLARS denoted by the $ symbol

£1 DOES NOT EQUAL $1

£50 would be fine with me, as long as there are some actual decent games.

Viva Pinata 2 and Black & White 3 would be more than enough to keep me happy, games that would actually benefit from a control method like this, rather than simply having tacked on gimmicky features.

@mcmonkeyplc

Tell that to Microsoft.

Watch the XBox 360 games library descend into the realm where developers build their game around the input method, rather than the game itself.

@ Eraser: 360 library's amplitude is already wide enough to cover everything. Don't worry.

At that price its a no brainer, look froward to having a play if only for the minority report menu's!!!

Considering the Wireless N apaptor is £49.99, I doubt they would sell Natal for £30. However, if it was under £50, then that would be very welcome.

As the Xbox 360 is now so far into its life cycle, they need to sell the Natal hardware for cost or less than cost, and then make the money on the games if they're going to get the take-up that the 3rd Party publishers would need to recoup their development costs.

Good pricing, mightt be a purchase for me if fable3 makes good use of it.

Personally i think it makes sense launching it at this price. This will encourage more people to get it who own a 360 plus bring in others who haven't. Then people will obviously buy a game or 2 with the hardware so i guess Microsoft will make their money back from the software.

All in all good news for all concerned if true. Cheap new hardware.

whatever the price is, knowing Microsoft, it will be subsidised as a loss leader and then every game will be Normal Game Price + £10 for being "Natal Enabled"

Like most here, I don't believe this for a minute. If they are selling an 802.11 n wireless adapter for 100 dollars/pounds then no way is Natal going to somehow be on sale for a fraction of that!

"If I'm wrong I will be genuinely surprised"

What, surprised that you aren't clairvoyant? You must get surprised a lot (which is rather ironic when you think about it).

If it's true (£50), it doesn't surprise me at all. I think MS strategy is to sell it as most as possible as quickly as possible in order Natal to become the standard on both hardcore and casual "cores". And they know that only with a low price they can achieve that. The price strategy between Natal and those HD DVD, wireless adapters and Live cameras has to be different...

"sounds like a collection of garbage mini games... "

Me-Too Bowling, Me-Too Tennis, Me-Too Golf... surely that would be a true revolution? :D

The price doesn't seem that unusual to me.

What people (edit: except for finexi :) ) seem to be missing is that MS want to make profit on each wifi adapter sold, so they price it accordingly and for that reason its not a fair comparison.

The Natal controller needs serious market penetration for it to be worth any developer's while making games that support it, so MS will initially take a hit on every Natal sold just get them out there in large numbers (exactly the way they and Sony did with the consoles themselves).


Personally, the price is neither here nor there at this stage. As others have said, I want to see a selection of games before I form an opinion. If the games are awesome £50 might be a massive bargain, but if the games blow (or are few and far between) it would be quite the opposite.

£50 is cheap for a car, and expensive for a bag of chips. It all depends what you get for your money, and at this stage we don't really know (marketing fluff and tech demos don't count in my eyes).

@penhalion
People who want the adaptor are likely to shell out the money anyway. Here they're trying to sell this to as many people as possible, they're trying to take on the Wii, remember. Anything more than £50 would definitely turn people off.

@svd_grasshopper:

No one said it comes with 14 games, it's (allegedly) being launched "alongside" 14 games. So 14 launch titles for the Natal sub-console, if that makes sense.

still think it will be crap no matter the price

I may not sell my 360 now, as much as most gaming in done on the PC now the 360 is around for exclusives. This may be a very big exclusive.

@svd_grasshopper

"they knocked up 14 games in the time it takes developers to make one"

Read the article dude. Its not out till Nov next year, so the games won't be out till then either will they.

And they didn't have one studio making every one of the 14 games. Again, if you read the article you would see lots of dev companies named.

Seriously.

"£50 is cheap for a car, and expensive for a bag of chips"

Oh but imagine how nice those chips would taste! Did you mean US chips (UK crisps) or UK chips (US fries) btw? Doesnt matter, either way I'm guessing they would be deep fried in God's own personal lard stash. Mmmmm, sacrilicious!

Anyway, £50. Sounds surprisingly sensible for Natal.

They'll almost certainly make a loss on the units for a while at that price (the custom image processing hardware being the bulk of the cost initially I'd imagine) but Natal-enabled Halo and Fable would push it well, and propel even more millions of copies of the games themselves off the shelves.

In fact, I doubt it would take long at all to recoup the hardware costs from related software.

My only concern will be timing and the next gen of consoles. By next November details will almost certainly have started filtering out about the next round of consoles, and unless Natal is transferrable it might be viewed as arriving too late in the lifecycle.

I'm all for the modular approach MS used this gen, but shipping the next gen console without motion control as standard would be suicide, so all those Natal units would become redundant.

Hmmm.. gonna have to ponder that for a while as I search for the most expensive chips I can find...

@kangarootoo : But svd_grasshopper has a point - I don't expect 14 full games for Natal at launch either.

Woah, under £50?

100% definite purchase if that's the case.

I'd be willing to pay £20+ more if it's worth it. Over £100 and I'd probably wait.

after tax £989.99

"I don't expect 14 full games for Natal at launch either."

If the API and dev units are out there now then there's no reason why 14 games or more couldn't support Natal from launch.

Menu/inventory navigation and headtracking should be very easily integrated, even into late development cycle products.

From-scratch Natal-centric (say, full body tracking) games might not be ready in time, but I don't doubt there will be support at some level for 14 games.