Price for Kinect Announced

It will only set you back $149... yea, that didn't sound so good

After E3, everyone who was anyone in the gaming community was talking about the newly dubbed Kinect motion camera. Websites, magazines and the general public were on it like Master Chief on a Grunt. Although Microsoft had easily won the crowd with information on Kinect, they casually left out one of the most important details: the price. Gaming journalists have been scrambling for a price tag for a month now, only to be denounced by Microsoft. Well, the wait is now over. Microsoft has just released the price on the highly anticipated Kinect motion camera, and it’s just as everyone expected.

The Kinect camera bundle, which includes the motion camera itself along with the Kinect Adventures game, will be $149.99. EB Games has been selling pre-orders for Kinect at this price since E3, but it has been unconfirmed until today. Microsoft has also stated that Kinect games developed by Microsoft will be regularly priced at $49.99, which is $10 less than your run-of-the-mill new Xbox 360 game. Microsoft also said that they are allowing third party developers to price their Kinect games at whatever they would like, but games such as Dance Central and Your Fitness have already been priced at $49.99. I guess there is no valid reason in breaking the Microsoft pricing groove for now.

So do you remember the cheaper, 4 gigabyte slim Xbox 360 that Microsoft announced after the conference? Yea, neither did I, but Microsoft has apparently made this version of the Xbox 360 a bundle with Kinect. The bundle in total (which is the new Xbox 360 slim with low memory, Kinect and Kinect Adventures) is going to be $299. This cheap Xbox 360 slim won’t come with a hard drive, but has the 4 gig’s of memory on a small internal drive. Microsoft didn’t mention a standard controller with the bundle, so it would seem that this, along with a hard drive, would have to be purchased separately. The problem with this is that Microsoft has yet to sell Xbox 360 slim hard drives separately. How convenient.

The Kinect motion camera is scheduled to be released in North America on November 4th, along with the Kinect console bundle.