Microsoft started the bloodiest price war in console history?

[NightDragon83]

BMaker11 said:

NightDragon83 said:
So far we're two years into the 8th gen, and already Nintendo and M$ have had to do some serious price cutting / bundling due to lagging sales and strong competition.

This is the most aggressive wave of price drops / deals I've seen for the first year all systems in a single gen were on the market since May 2002, when Sony and M$ slashed the prices of the PS2 and Xbox by $100 to $199, and Nintendo subsequently dropped the price of the GC $50 to $149.

A similar price war occurred in May of '96 (see a pattern here... E3 strikes again!) when SEGA slashed the Saturn's price tag in half from $399 to $199, and Sony slashed the PS1's price tag from $299 to $199 to match the announced launch price of the N64 which was released in September.

http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Price_cuts

wut? PS2 came out in 2000. They didn't drop price in the first year. And it wasn't an "aggressive" move for it to cut the price 2 year later. It was just the right time, per se, to do it. Xbox and GCN, on the other hand. They dropped price within 6 months of release. Because they were getting obliterated by PS2.

Read my post again... I said for the first year that ALL consoles of a single generation were on the market.  I know the PS2 came out in 2000, but the Xbox / GC didn't come out until Nov 2001, so of course Sony wasn't going to drop the price of the PS2 because it had zero competition for the first year and a half of its life aside from the Dreamcast, which was pretty much DOA anyway at that point.

It was an aggressive price drop on the part of ALL 3 console manufacturers... M$ announced they were slashing the price of the Xbox by 1/3, and  Sony matched it with the PS2 while Nintendo came out with a smaller but significant price drop of their own.  And Xbox and GC weren't getting "obliterated" at that point, they both had just come off successful holiday launches and were trying to keep momentum going against Sony.

Of course, when your console has an 18 month head start and one of the most popular games in the world at the time as an exclusive (GTAIII), it's not hard to see why M$ and Nintendo weren't able to gain ground on Sony.