I’ll come right out and say it just so that there’s no confusion about my overall feeling for the Xbox 360 Elite: I hate the Xbox 360 Elite. The entire third model and strategy behind it is nothing more than a gigantic slap in the face of the gaming community at large. It insults the intelligence of everyone with at least an ounce of sense in their heads.

Looking at the hardware itself, Microsoft has done an ample job convincing a lot of gamers that the 360 Premium is worth $399, and nobody’s really questioning it at this point in time. Even skeptical consumers like me tossed down the $399 required to go “premium” for an Xbox 360, and came away quite impressed. Most of us thought that what we were buying was the “best of the best” in terms of packages that were offered by Microsoft. Sure, maybe in the future, Microsoft would release an updated version of the premium system with a few extras here and there to entice new buyers, like a bigger hard drive and an HDMI port eventually. That was fair. That made sense.

This new version being fair for gamers is quite debatable at this point in time. We already know that it doesn’t make sense. This new version is nothing more than necessary changes being price-gouged from those who would like these features. Black casing and accessories, a bigger hard drive, and the inclusion of an HDMI port and cable do not justify a $479 price tag. In fact, it doesn’t really warrant a price increase. These inclusions probably cost Microsoft next to nothing to implement in their existing Xbox 360 Premium. Make no mistake – that is exactly what they did.



After trying to wrap my head around this for several weeks, off and on, I still cannot for the life of me understand why Microsoft decided it necessary to implement a third version of the Xbox 360 to add features that should have just been added to the existing 360 Premium. For a company that wants to be the leader in the game industry, Microsoft is doing absolutely everything it can to splinter their users and screw over practically everybody who becomes a customer. This mistake is just the latest in a very, very long series of blunders and poor decisions from Microsoft.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not picking on Microsoft for wanting to make money. Far from it, actually. Making a profit is the name of the game. Nobody wants to work for negative income. I think just about everyone can agree that this seems to be a bit of an extreme way to recoup losses, though. This is certainly not the way to do it.

Here’s a question I’d like you to keep in mind as you read the rest of this article:

“Who is Microsoft trying to appeal to with the 360 Elite?”

Really, sit down and look at the 360 Elite and all of the other projects they’re doing. See if you can figure it out.

Microsoft has made it very clear that they’d like to rip you off earn your money from content on Xbox Live Marketplace via a subscription that most pay for on top of this content. So to that end, a 14GB 20GB hard drive isn’t nearly enough space to make that a convenient task for its users. When you start downloading high-definition stuff, 20GB starts getting very laughable, very fast. An easy solution here is to offer a larger capacity hard drive for sale for as low a price as you possibly can, and to introduce that same drive in all of the new 360 Premium editions you sell. After all, they’d like as many people as possible to get in on this whole downloadable content thing. One would think that’s the real reason they included a hard drive with the 360 Premium in the first place. While they’re at it, they might as well add an HDMI port for people with fairly new HDTVs to enjoy that high-definition content that they’d like consumers to buy on the Marketplace.