That is only reasonable if one can create a perceivable value gap between oneself and your competitors.
What happens if the PS4 can be had for cheaper than $499 and offers a similar subscription plan? While a subscription plan is not common with consoles it does mean it is hard to incorporate a subscription plan into one's sales model. Given that Sony does have a financial arm and already uses Capital One for its brand of credit cards, MS would be essentially shortsighted to conclude that Sony won't quickly adopt the model if proven successful.
In the end, some posters might be right and this might end up being nothing but a money-grab by MS. But I find it rather convenient that MS's traditional modus operandi and the 9-24 PDF leaks is being ignored to paint a rather bleak image of Durango. MS has always been about adding features and services into its consoles only with the 360, MS became downright against doing it for free or at a loss. Nevertheless, somehow we now have enough information to conclude that MS will simply employ cheap tech using a high price and a subscription model to basically ripped consumers off.
Everything we have seen with any credibility outside of Vgleaks has shown that MS was intent on decoupling its applications hardware from its system based hardware. The vast majority of the hardware console diagrams known to come from MS have this decoupled configuration. Under that scenario offering the application apu and other essential hardware is all that is necessary to create dev kits especially alpha and beta ones. As tight lipped as MS has been about its console, how is this not a likely scenario especially as most of the information leaked seemed to have come from development sources?
And we all have zeroed in on “Durango” being the name of the overall console arch. But wasn’t “Xenon” readily applied to the overall arch, 360 CPU as well as the alpha kits? Why is it not likely that Durango is also used in such manner and that the Vgleak diagram is of a dev hardware that does not expose the complete hardware. Does the dev kit need to contain BC or any SOC that might be driving separate applications or secondary features?
Given the general consensus around here prior to start of last gen didn’t revolve around the Wii being the console sales unit leader while being hotly contested by both the 360 and PS3, I doubt that any of us can be bold in our predictions (excluding a knowledgeable few). There are enough unknowns to shoot holes in anyone’s argument.