Microsoft Announces New 360 Bundle Packs 103
Starting at the end of this month, you'll be able to get a little more for your dollar when buying a new Xbox 360. Gamasutra is reporting that Micrsoft has unveiled bundle pack versions of the Elite and standard consoles. The $449.99 Xbox 360 Elite and the standard $349.99 Xbox will now both come with packed-in game titles: Forza Motorsport 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. "Microsoft says both bundles will be available by the end of October and throughout the holidays. The retail packaging bears the company's new model-specific slogans, with the Elite tagged 'Go Big', and the standard 'Go Pro'. On October 3rd, various now-deleted online retail listings showed the existence of a third pack, the $279.99 'Arcade' bundle, which bore all similar markings as the new models, and was tagged 'Go Play' ... As yet, Microsoft has not officially announced the bundle, but all signs point to its imminent arrival."
HALO 3 (Score:1)
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http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/x/xbox360halo3console/default.htm [xbox.com]
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While I share your opinion that their currently bundled games themselves aren't very compelling, but I doubt we'll see a Halo 3 pack-in because I suspect Microsoft isn't terribly worried about moving systems this Christmas season. Wii's are still seeing supply fall short of demand and PS3 systems have fewer games at a higher price. And Halo 3 (and Mass Effect and
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While I share your opinion that their currently bundled games themselves aren't very compelling, but I doubt we'll see a Halo 3 pack-in because I suspect Microsoft isn't terribly worried about moving systems this Christmas season.
In the USA, their biggest and only relevant market, perhaps that's true. But they must be really desperate in Europe, as some of the FIGS (France, Italy, Germany, Spain, aka 4 of the big 5) countries have an official Halo 3 bundle already. And yes, it retails for less than the console + Halo 3 bought separately.
I don't know about UK, which doesn't seem to need it as their behaviour mimics the USA.
And Halo 3 (and Mass Effect and other soon-to-be-released titles) will move plenty of systems even being sold separately. The system is starting to move under its own momentum.
We'll see, but I doubt that. Already, in UK, it seems like what I believe was true : most people wanting Halo
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So I'd say that both the price drop AND Halo 3 are quite a substantial catalyst for the 360. taking it a step further and bundling two games with the already
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What will you do while it's off to be "repaired"?
The safest is to live in a cave, like I do. No overheating yet
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If you bundle it with Halo 3 those who purchase such packs won't buy a copy of Halo 3. A simple math. What they want people buy is this overpriced pack with bargain-bin games + Halo 3.
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Baffled (Score:5, Interesting)
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The real reason is obvious: You can't charge $60 for the game if you bundle it with the system, can you?
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Did they fix their console yet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes (Score:2)
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Lasted him all of a week before going 3 quadrants red. Not such a proper preventive fix after all, is it.
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Well, there are two things here. First, "fatal design flaws" rarely seem to stop people from purchasing electronics. As an example, see the iPhone. Secondly, what is the known, fatal design flaw anyway? I know my brother's 360 locked up a couple of days after he bought it, but he got it the first day they came out and they shipped him a replacement immediately. Mine has never so much as hiccuped, maybe I'm just lucky.
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It depends on when you bought your console, and when it failed.
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"That was just a fluke, and truly falls into the standard ~1-3% acceptable failure rate for consumer electronics."
WFT - 1 in every 34 consumer electronics devices failing is acceptable???
Imagine if the whole world worked that way. 1 in every 34 elevators failing, 1 in every 34 food items sold at stores being rotten, 1 in every 34 newspapers or books you buy filled with blank pages instead of news, 1 in every 34 flushes not "doing the job" ...
A 1% failure rate indicates a very poorly designed product,
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If elevators were $300 then yeah 1/34 might be about right. Newpapers do indeed have a high rate of misprints, smeared ink and blank pages. 1/34 is not unlikely. Books too have smeared ink and blank pages and offset print. 1/34 books at elast. Depending on what you make 1% may be very good, terri
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Newspapers USED to have a high rate of smeared ink, misprints, etc. Its a lot rarer nowadays, at least for big-city presses.
I haven't bought a book in years that has unslit pages (something that I used to see once in a while). Quality control has gone way up in most areas over the last decade.
Specifically, a 1 in 34 fail rate for consumer electronics, given the cost of handling returns, etc., IS a fiasco, unless its some cheapie $10 item that people are going to just throw away if it doesn't work.
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XBox360 is actually quite a high performance machine, I think to get the similar performance in a PC, you would be out several times the price.
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Not really. The 3 core PPC is a dumbed down version with a lot of the branch prediction hardware missing from the CPU. The memory bandwidth of all 3 machines are far greater then a normal PC with lower latency etc but it's not meant to be general purpose machine. and it has a lot less overhead from the OS. Your getting essentially a lower-mid range GPU with a highly
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There is no arguing that the 360'd 1 in 3 fail rate is horrible but 1% doesn't make the news as warranty replacements and exchanges capacity within the retail system can work with 1%. At 30% it gets silly and another system has to be worked out but if 1% of your goods fails within 1 year it's not too ba
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A 1% failure rate indicates a very poorly designed product, poorly executed, and with awful quality control processes
On the one hand, you are absolutely correct, but on the other hand, you clearly have no knowledge of the consumer electronic industry. It is pretty much standard pratice industry wide to give little or no QA on most electronics (it turns on? ship it). Basically companies have discovered that it is cheaper to let customers be their QA (I guess paying shipping is cheaper than hiring people; plus the added benefit that some customers will just give up and accept whatever the flaw is).
I think it goes withou
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It would seem to me that it should be easy to build proper QA testing into every device. For example, the 4 brand new Seagate hard drives I've got sitting on my desk, all bad. There's no reason they couldn't have been automatically spun up for a minute before being shipped, and their smart status queried - they would have been found to be defective before being shipped, and they could have fixed the problem on the production floor, instead of continuing to produce junk that is going to end up costing money
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"How do you know that those drives weren't tested like that, and somehow got excessive shock while in transit?"
I don't, but it doesn't seem likely. After all, when modern drives are powered down, the heads are parked automatically. Even 15 years ago, you could drop a hard drive from a desk and no harm would come of it (I know because a friend of mine did that to his brand new $500 80 meg WD drive, and I told him not to worry, it wasn't like those "old 5-1/4 20 meg" drives).
The heads can't "crash" durin
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* The PS3 also uses a slot instead of a disc tray, but given the weight and style of the system, I suspect most owners lay the system flat.
* The disc tray in the slim PS2 has a clip for the disc, allowing it to stand up safely.
The 360 was designed to look nice (and is marketed as) standing up, but it is not very stable, and has
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The slim PS2 uses a top-loading design, and as such clips the disk onto the hub (similar to the old PS1, Dreamcast, and Gamecube, though those couldn't be placed vertically). The old fat PS2 had a sliding tray like the Xbox 360, but also had a more substantial lip to keep the disk in place while vertical. Both PS2 designs are most stable with a stand (sold separately), though the fat PS2 is more stable than the slim with
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it's because of the DVD drive design... most drives have little rubber pads in place to keep the disc
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The chaps at UPS actually know what the Xbox is when returning it bwefore you return it, based on the box you bring it in with..... the failure rate is rumoured to be as high as 30% - I'd be very comfortable believing 15% for sure.
T
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Yay reading comprehension! I said my DVD-ROM failure fit into the standard 1-3% category. I said nothing about the percentage of overheating, only that measures have been taken to prevent it in the future.
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A number of things
1- cheap solder on the motherboard which is prone to crack and break
2- screw placements that cause damage if the board moves
3- A motherboard that warps when heated just right and if the solder softens
4- insufficient cooling
5- too much heat generation from CPU/GPU
Added together it makes it likely that the motherboard will warp and break the board. Thats what the red ring of death is.
The extended 3 warranty is only this problem. S
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Oops thats 65nm.
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That flaw being some combination of the "red ring of death" and the fact that the board eventually warps due to the unit overheating so often.
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2) It's been fixed for months, in any case.
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Of course, I had to exchange my copy of Halo 3 due to the dreaded disc read error [google.com]... But now even that is still working today. Just an FYI.
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2) It's been fixed for months, in any case.
There is hard data that 360's fail at a much greater rate then any other console or even any other non economy home electronic device. So no it's not just a few people. If you look for some data some distributors noted a ~30% exchange rate.
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fail [gwn.com]
rate [ripten.com]
and [smarthouse.com.au]
here [bbc.co.uk]
and [kotaku.com]
here. [1up.com]
This anecdote [kotaku.com]
An Over view. [wikipedia.org]
another article [dailytech.com]
As well Microsoft has announced about 100$ for each xbox 360 sold thus far($1 billion dollars). Which would be warranty repair costs and replacements costs for 1/3 of it's units if each replacement costs the same price as a new one in product costs and handling costs. Some say they may just be overly cautious but no manufacturer would announce such a huge warranty budget and risk extremely bad PR if there wasn't a problem. Given the next rev
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There's not actually 'one' design flaw in the 360, as Microsoft states on their warranty faq [xbox.com] page (towards the bottom), but one indicator for a multitude of possible problems. - Not sure if that should make you feel better.
I'm personally waiting for my 4th 360 from Microsoft, my first one was purchased on launch day. As of today, I have not paid one cent for the repairs or shipping, the only cost to me has been time without a 360, which you can also experience in larger measure by not buying one until
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Hopefully, you'll
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If ANYTHING in my house broke that often, to hell with the warranty, I'd buy a different brand.
The problem is game consoles aren't interchangable once you've invested in games. Plus your basic alternatives are a Wii or a PS3. Wii has a different focus, and the PS3 costs a lot more, and again the game lineups are different. It's not like buying a toaster.
Microsoft for once did the right thing by extending the warranty. I can see how people would be willing to stick with them. That said, I own a launch version of the 360 and it's too damn noisy, the games demand you have a high-def TV, and I real
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I am just sick and tiered of people blaming the users for faulty hardware, which at this point in time there really has been proven more then once.
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Seriously, it has a known, fatal design flaw. Why doesn't anybody but me see how awful this is? You fix that, and give me some way to guarantee that I will receive a fixed version of the console, and maybe I'll consider buying. Until then, it'd be pretty fucking stupid to spend hundreds of dollars on something that might become a paperweight after a month. I just don't get why MS didn't jump all over this and fix it immediately and issue a big press release about how awesome they were and so on.
The ones manufactured after August are supposed to be perfectly fixed. I broke down and bought one last week, sheer curiosity. But alas! It looks like one of the games I bought to go with it is now bundled. At least I only paid $30 for it.
Of more importance, Microsoft has seriously got to take a look at increasing the size of the default hard drive. With all the video they want us to download from the Xbox Live media servers, there's no frickin' way 20gb is going to cut it, especially since they don't prov
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Seriously, it has a known, fatal design flaw.
Which is fixed. Manufacture date after September 15th or so of this year and you get the Falcon (65nm) chipset which runs cooler. Plus the bigger heatsink assembly has been going out since late July. You're almost a month late or over two months late with your objection depending on which option you feel fixes the issue.
I just don't get why MS didn't jump all over this and fix it immediately and issue a big press release about how awesome they were and so on.
Maybe because it wasn't as prevalent a problem as the rabid gamer blog networks made it out to be?
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yawn (Score:1)
Go buy your second or third, today! (Score:3, Insightful)
Missing Slogan... (Score:1)
The "Go Screw Yourself" pack comes with no controller and a Pokemon game for the N-Cube.
So that's why... (Score:2)
I was going to say that's quite a hefty price drop and nice to see the premium finally reach the sub-£200 mark, makes the 360 damn attractive. Their prices have always been good and they did the same with the PS3 but I almost thought it was a typo when I saw it!
Sounds more like a marketing piece for Microsoft (Score:2)
Wow, they bundled games to their system. This wasn't even written by a contributer. Seems like Zonk is in Microsoft's back pocket.
More interesting will be the EA bundle (Score:2)
Even more interesting would have been a Japan-centric game release of formerly Japan-only xBox360 games (there are some super sweet ones) for the US market, pre-installed and with super cool package add-ons.
Arcade (Score:1)
Release a Blu-ray drive and I'll get one (Score:1, Redundant)
Why should Microsoft do this? (Score:2)
Microsoft doesn't want to suffer this also.
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But mainly, MS has an opportunity to capture a market that's not interested i
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It's ingenious, really. Parents don't have to spend extra cash buying games for Timmy's Xbox this Christmas, they can just get the bundle. After all, Joe Parent doesn't know that the bundled games aren't hot with the kids right now. Little Timmy will play bundled games for a couple of weeks and begin demanding for hit titles like Halo. Parents, having already gotten the box already, will just cave and start buying more 360 games.
Given the loss MS took (and perhaps continue to take) on hardware sold, this
The only bundle I want... (Score:2)
I hope the new process chips work out for them, or it's going to be a much rougher ride than a simple $1 bn one-time expense and PR damage control. This one was not ready for prime time. It's a defective product, and if MS doesn't make good, there's going to be class actions.
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Toro
So hey (Score:1)
I Want One (Score:2)