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Microsoft shaves $40 off price of Kinect

The Xbox Kinect will now retail for $109.99, Microsoft announced today.

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Reuters
A user tries out a 3D Star Wars game on the Xbox Kinect at an electronics expo in Las Vegas.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Microsoft is slashing the price of the Kinect by 40 bucks. 

In a post to his Major Nelson blog, Larry Hyrb, the director of programming for Xbox Live, said that the motion-sensing peripheral will now sell for $109.99 – down from $149.99 at launch. According to Hyrb, consumers in the North America, Latin America, and Asia Pacific markets can all take advantage of the new price immediately; consumers in Australia and New Zealand will have to wait until early October. 

As Brett Molina notes over at USA Today, the Kinect has sold pretty well for Microsoft. Back in January, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft had unloaded 18 million Kinect peripherals worldwide since November of 2010 – not bad for a relatively expensive after-market add-on. So why is Microsoft putting a new price tag on the Kinect?

Well, probably to clear the shelves for new products such as SmartGlass – and not to invigorate interest in an aging product. 

In related news, Microsoft recently – and completely inadvertently – confirmed the existence of the next generation Xbox console, widely rumored to be called the Xbox 720. The slip-up occurred during the Vergecast, a tech podcast, when Windows Live general manager Brian Hall included the "new Xbox" on a list of products that will eventually interface with the forthcoming Windows 8 operating system.

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