Neither Microsoft or Sony can afford to do anything else about price for now. Think about it-they've battered each other since late 2006 in a bitter fight over market share. Microsoft can't justify massive price cuts (which would mean losing more money in the Xbox division) when they're up against increasing competition from Apple and Google in their core areas of business. Sony can't afford major losses in their gaming business because their core businesses (such as television sales) are also seeing weaker sales and stronger competition from companies such as Samsung.

This is it for now, in terms of price wars. Unless the highly unlikely happens and Nintendo join in with a Wii price cut this year, of course.

95 percent of xbox being sold is the arcade version. the lowered price of the elite will not sell more xboxs unless they bring down the price of the arcade version to $150.

MS did the expected, no more price cutting for a year or two atleast for either console. Now it just remains to be seen which one has more value to the average consumer.

People can keep on fantazising about 249$ price point for a long long time. If MS starts selling the Arcade for any lower than it allready is they would be shooting themselves to the leg. (unless they recover the losses with increased live online payment?)

You like beeing ironic don't you ?

Now that the price are aligned, the situation is inverted.

People used to say : Figures are very bad for the PS3 but hey... it cost more so it is doing quite well !

Now people might say : Figures are good for the PS3 now but hey... it is competing agains't a machine that doesn't have BR, a lot of problem with the hardware and no free online services.

... future fanboys war will be interesting...

Not quite what I expected - no HDD on the Arcade still, and it could be that both games and the HDMI cable have been removed from the Elite. So it woudld be kinda a black Pro. Nothing much to say though. It won't affect the PS3 at all, nor the Wii.

It won't do much, nothing to the initial boost and not a lot in the run to the holidays.

95% ? Source on that affirmation ?

pslee: I believe 60% are for the XBox 360 Arcade and the other 40% is for the other XBox 360 models.
No way Arcade XBox 360 accounts for 95% of the 360s total sales.

$250 is the magic number for the Elite, it has no value over the PS3 at the $299 price with the Elite also being $299. Stupid move if you ask me, MS seems desperate now. They should have dropped to $250, then it would be game over for the PS3, but as it stand there have been a $299 360 on the market for a year now, this move wont do much for the 360... LOL