Microsoft Talks New Arcade Xbox SKU, Purple Boxes, And Transfer Kits

We spoke with Josh Hutto, director of console marketing at Xbox, to get the down and dirty details about the new Xbox 360 S.

AV KIT
You don't even have to move any of those from the back of your TV. You can just take out your current Xbox 360, plug in the AV cords that you have today, and it works perfectly with the new Xbox. So no new cables to buy. The power supply you will have to change out.

POWER USE
I don't know the exact wattage, but I do know that it complies with all of the European standards for standby. It's one watt standby.

TRANSFER KIT
We're going to have a transfer kit at retail for $19.99, so for people that want to go that route they'll be able to transfer the data from their current 360 to their new 360. Or you can just use USB thumb drives, the 16GB thumb drive and get it over using a thumb drive, and that's really a very easy way to do it as well. You basically have a menu. You choose which ones you want to transfer over right away so like your gamer profile, your game saves, you move that over. It's really easy. It only takes like five or ten minutes.

BUILT-IN OPTICAL JACK
That was one of the things people didn't like in the past, that you had to have a dongle in order to make that work. We put it onboard so that way if you have a complex AV system you can run it right out of your Xbox into your receiver.

KINECT POSITIONING
You have flexibility on where to put it. That's usually where most people are going to put it is right below the TV. It's the most natural place. But it has a lot of flexibility from around two feet to about six feet high depending on where you want to put it in your cabinet.

DESIGN INSPIRATION
The design team wanted to make sure we stayed true to who we are. It still has the classic inhale shape. We took that, refined it, modernized it a little bit. Clearly there's a little harkening back to the original Xbox, but it's meant to modernize the current 360 not to go back to the original Xbox.

NEW PURPLE BOXES
The Kinect purple is going to be used as a way to wayfind. When you go into retail whenever you see purple you know it's Kinect. So when you go in they'll have green amaray cases and purple amaray cases that let consumers know that "This is a Kinect game", "this is a non-Kinect game." Just like with Live. If you see orange, you know there's a little bit of Live in it.

THE PURPLE RULES
We have some rules and so on on what they have to do. Just some guidelines. If it's a purple amaray case, it basically means that can only be played with Kinect. So hybrid experiences I think that'll be up to the publishers how they want to treat that.

XBOX 360 S ARCADE
In the U.S. we're going to clear out the current Elites and Arcades with a $50 price cut [$250 and $150 respectively -- Ed]. This is basically the replacement for the Elite. We are going to have a replacement for the $199 Arcade. That'll be sometime in late summer.

WILL IT HAVE A HARD DRIVE?
We're not releasing all of the specs on it, but there will be a $199 version of this form factor.