J Allard recently took part in an hour long chat session between himself and gamers. In the chat, participants were able to be much more candid than they would normally be in a professional setting.

The question that was most on the tongues of gamers: why bother offering the core system at all?

“Recognize that more than 75 percent of the folks on Xbox have not played Halo. By introducing the Core System, we are sending a signal to the market that we are committed to this part of the market, just like with the Xbox 360 premium bundle that we are committed to,” Allard replied.

He commented that the Xbox 360 is meant to be distributed to a much wider audience. The $299 core system is meant to attract the casual gamer who will pick up the occasional game, while the $399 Xbox 360 is meant for the true gamer.

Defening the $400 price tag of the system, Allard says “it was worth noting that the PS2 launched at $368 with no hard drive, no online service, no memory card, no wireless [controller], no voice, no network adapter, no remote, and only support for two controllers. That’s not the reason we priced the system this way, but it does provide a comparative frame of reference for what you are getting.”

He defended the price of $99 for a 20GB hard drive by pointing out it is a detachable 2.5″ hard drive, instead of the usual internal drive. He also confirmed that the hard drive will be used by many games. “Consider this last generation, where somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 percent of game consoles had hard drives attached. This did not deter game developers from utilizing the hard drive both for exclusive games and cross-platform games on Xbox. This generation, our first-party team and our exclusive-content developers are just as committed to using the hard drive, and like they demonstrated with this generation, our third-party cross-platform developers are committed as well. Games like Splinter Cell, Madden, and Tony Hawk all demonstrated unique capabilities in hard-drive configured systems.”

Ultimately, Allard says that they are trying to expand the gaming market from a core group of hardcore users, and they feel they can do this more effectively by offering a multi-tier system.

Provided by Geekstreak