If a 360 purchaser wants to play games on Xbox Live, they have a great choice already - a $299 60GB model.  If a 360 purchaser doesn't even have broadband, but still wants to play the large and impressive physical media library available, why.... look at that!  They can buy a 360 for $199.

Sounds like you want to make the choice for consumers on what they should feel is a worthy value.  Sorry, but you don't get to make that decision - the consumers do.  If no consumers wanted to buy the Arcade model, MS would have cut it from the console selection long ago. 

And hey, if someone buys a $199 model and decides later on they really needed the hard drive, there's a $99 60GB upgrade kit with 3 months of live and a headset for them. 

Believe what you want, but not every potential console buyer has broadband to take advantage of Xbox Live.  Just like not every potential buyer has a 42"+ HDTV to take advantage of PS3's bluray drive.   But at least Xbox owners get a choice for what overpriced option they get, with a further choice to upgrade it necessary :O  snap.

Again using anecdotal information? Did we learn anything from July NPD?

1. well a pricecut is made to stimulate the demand...

2. Your friends are not the smartest guys out there, are they? Just buy the pro and everything is fine. You see the choise-system works just as long as people think about their choice. I guess your friends didn't.

3. for the kids: "Viva Pinata Trouble in Paradies", "Banjo Kazooie Nuts and bolts" for the casuals "Lips", "You are in the movies", "RockBand", "Guitar Hero"

And why has the 360 less to offer as time passes by? The library gets bigger and bigger, the marketplace gets bigger and bigger, New Xbox Live experience coming, former PS3-exclusives announced for 360, JRPGS coming, well what is the Xbox360 missing to offer?

Was perfect timing for me. I threw an event on Saturday and picked up 2 Arcades on Friday as raffle items. In the past I gave away a single pro.

Also as to the argument. Add $199.99 the Arcade will appeal to a new demographic that may only be interested in a few games and wont need a HDD or a WiFi connection. It also allows people to get in while saving up.  So they can pickup an Arcade now and maybe ask for a HDD for Christmas or simply save up for it.

You would be wrong on two accounts... both on Sony's and Microsoft, but I'll let you google it and find out for yourself the real reason Microsoft and Sony are in this buisness.

   Haha that is EXACTLY the way I look at it, and why I greatly prefer Nintendo and Sony to Microsoft.  Microsoft always talks a good open source/customer centered type game until they get the monopoly and then suddenly everything is 500 dollars or more and doesn't work right.

    As to the 360 price cut there is a point after which no amount of price cuts will help the 360.  There is a base of people who will buy the 360 (the teenage to early 20s gamerboy market) with very few outside of the demo interested at all.  Plenty of mainstream people have embraced Nindendo (wii, SNES, NES) and Sony (PS, PS2) systems, but never have they embraced MS and the 360 really doesn't seem to have any reasons for that to change.  What are the big 360 games?  Oh yah, yet another FPS game and an adult oriented RPG, thats going to bring in the kids and others thinking twice about the Xbox brand.

   All MS is doing is reaching its saturation point at about 30 million faster.  They will never reach the kind of main stream market numbers Nintendo and Sony can, they have a bad image outside of their core demographic.  I know a lot of friends buying consoles, many of them female, and the choice is always PS3 or Wii (the women usually pick Wii though thats a function of price as much as anything else, I think Little Big Planet and Home will help shift that a bit) the 360 never even enters into it.  Ditto for anyone I know with kids, the 360 isn't even on the table unless the kid is a boy over 14.

Did you say something?

In my opinion it comes down to this. the only SKU that Could have a real impact on numbers is the Srcade. Now for the most part the people that would be attracted to the $199 Arcade are the same people that would be attracted to the Wii. With the sheer demand and popularity of the Wii I seriously doubt that MS will Siphon that many buyers away from the Wii. Will there be some boost? I'd be shocked if there wasn't, but how much of a boost are we talking, and for how long? In Europe they got a Small to moderate boost that lasted less than a half a year, and in the end really didn't effect PS3 or Wii sales at all. It really does come down to Title recognition. In Europe people know names like Mario Kart and SSB. in the US people know Socom and metal gear Solid. What your average gamer doesn't know is Fable or even to some extent Gears of War (Yes Gears was popular, but it was popular to existing XBOX 360 owners) A price drop will help, but probvably not as much as 360 fanboys want to believe.

LOL.

It depends on whether consumers are willing to pay less to buy a console with many optional features left out. Although there might be tremendous peer pressure to get one WITH those optional features.

(No one likes to buy something knowing that they've left some tempting, albeit unnecessary parts, right?)