Microsoft recently announced that the upcoming next-generation gaming console know as the Xbox 360 will come in two editions. I posted on here shortly after they made the announcement the press brief, which included the details of each edition. That posting can be found here.
The choice of two editions at first thought to me seems confusing and pointless. I found myself hopelessly searching for answers to questions I had; like if you buy the Core package are you forced to buy a memory card to save your games, or will it have some sort of internal memory? So far it seems your forced into buying a memory card to even begin playing the games. To use the backward compatibility with the original Xbox games you have to have the Hard Drive which is $99 so it ends up being the same price as the Premium edition with less included extras. It seems to me the Core package is more just a dud product so Microsoft can still claim to be at the $299 sweet spot that we have enjoyed for years. I don’t see many gamers buying the Core package because of these downfalls. The only reason I can see buying the Core is if all you need is a DVD (which you can buy for about $49 at Walmart) player or a Media Center Extender (which runs normally about the same price as the Core system). So really the Core system is pointless to buy when the Premium version comes with so many included features for just $100 more saving you about $200 if you were to buy the Core package. All I can say is you can put me down for a Premium, now all I need to do is pay for it. What would be ideal though is if Microsoft would just give everyone and Xbox 360 for free, that would make their goal of a billion gamers a lot easier. We can only dream.
