Odysseus said:
no. the core as it is presently configured is a non-starter. the core simply must come with the contents of the premium (sans the hard drive, of course) if it is to be taken seriously as a sku.
Good point.
What a lot of people miss in their rush to talk about the nonsense, made-up category of "casuals" (as opposed to actually meaningful demographics of players) is the effect that multiple SKUs has on people's buying decisions.
When people went to buy PS2s, they were unlikely to "think" about the price in terms of $X00 + $30 memory card + $50 game etc. because (a) there was only one way to buy a PS2 and (b) every system currently available on the market had the same assumptions.
Today, you'll have a very few people (screechy aunts and grandpas buying Xmas presents they don't understand) who go to a store with no knowledge whatsoever about the product they're buying, but most people will find out that there are multiple different versions of the Xbox
and out of fear of making a purchasing mistake try to find out what the difference is.
The problem with the Core right now is that it fails both comparisons that are likely to come up. If someone tries to decide between a $250 Wii and a $250 Core, the pack-in game makes it obvious that the Wii is a much better "value. If someone tries to decide between a $250 Core and a $350 Premium, you have the same problem the Core has always had -- even a tiny bit of research (like asking the guy at the store) tells you that you'll need a $40 memory card, at which point the long list of features missing from the version that's
really only $60 cheaper makes it an obviously bum deal.
Packing in a memory card fixes that problem; packing in all the extra stuff in the Premium (but leaving the memory card extra)
also fixes that problem. Leaving the Core the way it is sucks and is going to keep being irrelevant until MS takes one of the two above choices.
