Kinect price estimates confirmed for Australia

Your Kinect unit will travel to you in style, international gamer!

Microsoft Australia today delivered the official pricing plans for their upcoming motion controller Kinect (nee Natal).  EB Games have had the RRP estimate at $199 AU for a while now, and this announcement now makes that number gospel.  Still no release date available, but as the press release makes a big deal of talking about Christmas trees, so you can probably assume November/December sometime.

The standalone Kinect bundle will include the Kinect Adventures game, which is good news considering I’d have expected to pay a lot more for a game that lets you go anywhere you want.

America have lead the pricing announcements, stating that Kinect will retail over there for $150 US.   Which I guess leaves only one question for us non-US gamers to ponder:

Why the fuck is it so expensive for us?

Apparently Microsoft care so much about the release of Kinect later this year that they’re going to be shipping each Kinect unit in it’s very own air-conditioned shipping container covered in solid gold.  Or at least I assume that’s what they’re doing, because how else do we explain the ~$30AU price hike that seems to have attached itself to each Kinect somewhere over the Pacific Ocean?

I guess we should be used to it by now.  After all, we are the continent that’s expected to pay ~150% of a game’s original US RRP.  I suppose at the very least we can be thankful that we’re not the UK, who’ve been given the stunningly inflated RRP price of 130GBP, the equivalent of around $200 US.

So with prices this artificially inflated consumers better take heed of Xbox AU’s David McLean advice, and “will definitely want to pre-order at their retailer of choice to secure their Kinect”.  Unless of course we discover there is no region locking for the Kinect, in which case I’m sure we can always find less lavish ways to ship ourselves a unit from the States.

Check out the full announcement over at InsiderX, and don’t forget to pre-order! We don’t want to all gouge ourselves stupid at once and cause a shortage!