Price part of the problem. Simply put the XBO cost more that PS4 and has weaker hardware. Price will help but there isn't anything they can do to about the hardware differences. 

I would say PS's online community is better, particularly that features like chat and even free to play multiplayer games are not behind a paywall. PS4 also has multiplayers which allow both PS4 and PC players (unlike XBone), expanding community even further. Not to mention that PS4 has simply outsold XBone so far, and thus the community is bigger.

They're not going to remove the HDD; the rumor says it will have a 1TB HDD installed. It's the optical BD drive that could be cut, meaning no optical media. No BD playback, no DVDs, and no retail games, meaning everything bought for the XB1 must be bought through MS, eliminating retailers.

It's really the ideal set up for any hardware/platform seller because they sell every copy of every bit of media that goes to consumer hands. 

Selling the XB1 without Kinect seems doable, but also flies contrary to one of the biggest selling points that makes the XB1 stand out as a home appliance/device. 

Ideally, and I speak only from a consumer standpoint, MS will simply sell the current package for $100 less, maybe with a new white paint job if there's any truth to the rumors. 

I'm not betting on the latter. 

Price is the problem with the system. They need to fix that first  and they need to fix it fast.

cool beans..though I hope that discless XB1 rumor floating around isn't this...

You're not looking at this from the perspective of long term trends. You're thinking "the gap's only a little more than a million units; that's not so bad." But if the current sales trends remain consistent (it helps to think of sales in terms of overall marketshare percentages), the XB1 will continue to fall behind the PS4 at a pretty significant rate. By December 2014, the XB1 could start looking like an also ran product if the prices remain the same and there is nothing compelling to justify the additional cost. 

Less than a year; they had to react fast.

The 60GB SKU went from $599 to $499 and the 20GB SKU (no WiFi, no memory card readers) was dropped before the 2007 holiday season.

mutantsushi said: gergroy said: you know what is funny about this thread and this gen in general? The complete reversal of last gen. Last gen, you had sony fans talking about future price cuts that would push the ps3 into first place or at least past the 360 and then you had MS fans downplaying the effect of price cuts.... and now everything is backwards Last gen Sony price-cuts were heavily influenced by Blu-Ray drive prices dropping, to the point those now cost ~$25. That was a clearly forseeable process, once Blu-Ray 'won' the format war especially. MS doesn't have any process like that helping it to disproportionatly lower it's price. As long as they keep bundling Kinect, they will be proportionately LESS able to drop price, as camera HW isn't subject to process improvements like RAM, CPU are. If MS does drop Kinect bundling, then they could plausibly drop the price to meet/beat Sony's price. Although note that Sony just bought a memory producer which they will likely be using for GDDR, so the $ differential there is muted.

um, ok... that was only kind of related to my post, but ok...  also, sony's price cuts were more heavily influenced by keeping demand up to be honest.  The machine didn't even start turning a profit for like three or four years.  Not that Microsoft would ever be able to keep pace with Sony even given an equal spec sheet.  Sony is a hardware company, microsoft is a software company, they each have their strengths and unfortunately for microsoft, manufacturing is not one of theirs...

Sony threw a lot of money away to keep the PS3 sustainable. Clearly they overestimated the demand for what they were selling and had to respond appropriately or lose developers.

It's that last bit that MS is concerned with; maintaining optimal partnerships with their third party developers to ensure that they have their continued, full support. Every copy sold is a licensing fee paid, so that's where the slack will have to be taken up. Sell more games. Hard to do that if more and more consumers are buying into a competing product. 

And yes; rumors like this can have a very negative effect on sales. If I'm Joe Average on the cusp of buying a new gen console and I'm leaning towards an XB1 but I hear that MS might be dropping the price by $100, I'd be an idiot or just extremely impatient not to wait out the rumor. 

gergroy said: you know what is funny about this thread and this gen in general? The complete reversal of last gen. Last gen, you had sony fans talking about future price cuts that would push the ps3 into first place or at least past the 360 and then you had MS fans downplaying the effect of price cuts.... and now everything is backwards

The only difference is price cuts did help the PS3.  Of course, they only removed BC lower the cost at first, not take away the ability to play retail games.  Now, if it's true that MS is going to remove the Bluray drive to match the PS4's price, they are going to be in for a shock if they actually think that will help them.  Discs are still where the VAST majority of game sales are coming from, especially for consoles.  MS is just going to confuse the everyday customer, and piss off the core gamer, who would rather them drop Kinect.  Not to mention that this will just bring up the whole DRM fiasco again, though not to the extent it reached in 2013.