Looking at the Holiday deal tracker http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=136237&page=1# nearly every major retailer has deals this week and the 1st advertisement for next week continues the trend at Target.

They may be looking at it that way but I'm not a fan of considering a gift card "X" amount off of what's initially being purchased because it's not, it's just "X" amount off of other shit. Also, an official price cut just has more impact IMO. So unless they actually do an official price cut, I feel that MS is dropping the ball as far as maximum holiday impact is concerned. I mean I'm sure they know what they are doing for the long haul and I'm not questioning that but when it comes to VGChartz debates, 360 will not beat PS this year if their approach stays the same.

Oh yeah, cool deal tracking thread. I'm on the lookout for deals for a friend of mine and this is useful.

Agree to a certain extent, but this time of year people likely to purchase additional items at the same store.

Lol, I swear to god I just came to mention that. I realized that it's a sound approach if you look at the X-Mas holiday shopping mindset. I still feel however that a full on price cut is "better".

ah MS....deals are good but doesnt compare to an official price cut

There are giftcards for the PS3, too.
I don't know, maybe this is there strategy.
If there would be an official price-cut, imo it would be on 15th November.
But I don't think that there will be one.

I've been gone for a while, but have something I can add to this.

We as a retailer will be having significant gift card promotions throught the holidays on new 360's, but no official price cut appears to be on the horizon.

HOWEVER, MS is absolutley flooding the channels right now with shipments, were seeing over 3x the amount of regular shipment we normally recieve from MS so they are certainly up to something, who knows maybe a price cut IS actually coming.

is this more than last year same time?

Ya more than last year, or I guess about the same but when you factor in last year had the Slim and Kinect still being new it doesn't really make sense the quantity MS is shipping.  I'm not gonna lie 360 sales have been down for a while now in comparison to last year and most stores are already sitting at a pretty nice quantity of systems and MS is shipping a rediculous amount of 360's into stores the past two days.  Maybe they just plan on selling alot during COD or they really think Kinect is gonna push them to huge numbers over the holidays but as of right now it seems to me they are overshipping by quite a bit unless they have something up their sleeve thats gonna move some serious hardware.