Finally: Microsoft drops the price of the X360 $50 usd

[Lord N]

endimion said:

Lord N said:

mrstickball said:


Again, it's all rumor from a "reliable" source, but these are the same resources that said we'd see a MS pricedrop by August 1st....Which we did.

Shit, I could have told you that the 360 would see a price drop soon. MS had to do something to counter the PS3 price drop and to divert attention from the hardware issues, so it wasn't hard to see this coming.

On the other hand, two price drops within a span of three months would be downright retarded. The media would have a ball spinning it, and they'd have two SKU's on the market(one of which is probably still losing money) for nothing.

Lastly, the price isn't even the reason its sales have been sluggish all year. It also has to do with its one-dimensional software library. If MS were going to do a $100 cut, they've have done it all at once across all SKU's, especially if they wanted to clear out inventory.

Having three SKU's on the market at once and then decreasing the price difference between the Premium and the Core and increasing the price between the Premium and the Elite is just dumb-da-dumb-dumb-dumb, and is almost on par with the Genesis/Sega CD/32X bungling.

 first of PS3 is not doing a price drop but a clearance price.... MS is doing a real one not to clear a model but to clear a generation of chips.... so I don't think a reaction to the PS3 price drop is the main reason

no it's not dumb... why should they cut it more and make less money if their market analist told them the stock will be cleared in time for the falcon.. and then do a another cut on the falcon because it cost them less money to produce.... it makes perfect sense to me  IMHO especialy business wise to make more profit, which is the purpose of a corporation in the first place 

 

Call it what you want, but waiting almost two years to drop the price by a pitiful $50 bucks is ridiculous. It's not a reaction to the PS3 price drop? C'mon. You can't wait for two years AND a price cut by the competition and then just do nothing. That would look even worse.

Three SKU's is dumb. It confuses customers, it limits developers because they now have to take into account that one of them doesn't have a hard drive, it limits the content that can appear on XLA because again, one of them doesn't have a hard drive, and it also affects how they can be priced. The way it is now, the Core is more handicapped than the closest parking space at the grocery store, because Core + 512MB memory card makes it only $20 less expensive than the premium, and you still don't have HD output, you're still without 19.5GB of storage, and you don't get wireless controllers. The price between the Premium and Elite just INCREASED despite the fact that the latter doesn't provide anything more for gaming. Another price drop on the Premium would make the Core completely worthless and would increase the raise the price difference between the Premium and the Elite to a whopping $150. If they wanted to insure a profit, then there should have just been one SKU instead of pumping R&D, manufacturing, marketing, and advertising into two SKU's and then promptly proceeding to make them look like complete and total ripoffs.

A $100 price drop between last Christmas and this Spring and a more diverse game library would have been a hell of a lot better than this. It would have all but dealt the final blow to the PS3 just months after launch and would have enabled the 360 to atleast compete on some level with the Wii. Instead, the Wii will have atleast another 8 months to a year all to itself as the cheapest console even if it doesn't do a price cut, and Sony is now able to do another $100 price cut sooner(possibly in time for MGS4) and decrease the difference even further.