Gamestop Readies Trade-In for Xbox 360 Elite Release

Now that the Elite's on its way, with that elusive 120 gig hard drive, HDMI enabled and having IPTV capabilities, you might just want to trade in your old Xbox or Xbox 360 (any SKU), for the black cased system from Microsoft. However, I'm not so sure how people are going to do just that if they have precious content still sleeping in the old Xbox's hard drive. You can't trade it in without the drive I'm sure and if you want to transfer data to the Elite, you have to have the old machine with you. I'm sure gamers will find a way. Maybe at the Trade-In Store...?

So this is the deal: you'll be getting $250 for the Premium Xbox 360, $200 for Core (which means you'll be getting a good 67% of the original value) and $50 for the original Xbox (not 360). These figures were provided by thoughtful guys over at Xbox 360 Fanboy and several Gamestop managers together. The Xbox 360 Elite will retail for $480 when it launches on April 29, so you can see why it is advisable to trade in your old system.

But there is one little detail to be mentioned and I would advise you to keep a steady position in your chair/armchair as this one will take off some of that burning desire to acquire the Elite: remember the 120 gig hard drive? Yeah, it's sold separately. This was known before but adding the Elite's launch price and the $180 you'd have to pay for the storage unit....oh my God, I don't even want to think about it. And I thought the PS3 was expensive.

However, if you do decide to acquire the system, there is still a chance to get your old hard drive content back, not including saves and other things like that, but just the games, via your Gamertag as the good guys at XBLA don't charge twice for the same game downloaded. That's that. Think about it a lot, it's not worth throwing away all you've accomplished so far for a 120 GB HDD that you may not even need.