selnor said:
Seihyouken said: Is it really accurate to call the new $299.99 "Elite" model a price drop? The fact of the matter is that the 360 isn't any cheaper than it was two months ago. $199.99 and $299.99 (and Microsoft's Euro/Pound/Yen conversions) are still the two opening prices with which to purchase a 360. All that's changed is that there simply isn't an option to pay $100 more for 60 more GBs, an HDMI cable and a black finish.
Speaking of which, now that the Elite console doesn't offer an HDMI cable, can it really be considered an Elite? The truth is that all the current Elite is is essentially a black pro with 60 more GBs.
No matter how you look at it, Microsoft's move of "price-cutting" the Elite to $299 isn't any different than when they exchanged the 20GB Pros for 60GB models last year or when Sony turned the 40GBs into 80GBs. It's not price cutting. What it is is adding value which has never led to a noticable increase in hardware sales so far this generation and won't begin to now.
If Microsoft wants to avoid completely getting dominated by Sony and Nintendo in the similar or even worse way than Sony was dominated by Microsoft and Nintendo last year, they're going to have to actually drop the price of at least one of their two models. |
You assume that the PS3 being $299 is what consumers have been waiting for. Personally I believe it will get an initial spike and fall back to last again. I believe in the mainstream non hardcore market the 360 games offer more to those people. The 360 beat PS3 this week by nearly double the sales.
Also assuming Blu Ray is what everyone wants is also flawed. I wont buy Blu Ray because of the extortinate film prices. The same film in UK can release on DVD for £10 cheaper. The average consumer sees that, hence why Blu Ray still has just one aisle in all major UK outlets and is not even sold in some small outlets.
It's my opinion though. We will see how it pans out.
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Actually, people are buying blu-ray. And, whether you like it or not, it IS going to become the standard for disc media. Blu-ray will be the only sold media for movies soon enough. Do you not remember VHS to DVD? You realize that took a long time as well? The difference is now that our technology improves at a very fast pace. Before you know it HDTV's are going to be much cheaper. When that happens, and the dev prices of blu-ray movies drop, dvds will be fazed out. It is a dead format, the movie industry will eventually no longer support it.
Blu-ray will be the last supported hard copy media for entertainment. After that, it's all digital. And you wont be seeing all digital for at least another 10 years.. because our internet infastructure is not good enough for it right now.
Sony has themselves in a fantastic place. Blu-ray scales much better than any other media. If you get a bigger DVD.. well.. you still get a linear increase in write speed, while blu ray is exponential?(Possibly quadratic, I have not looked hard at it) In terms of capacity, people were all on about the new 100gb DVD, but 100gb, 200gb and 400gb blu-ray discs are already done. Infact, they're working on 1 TB blu-ray discs right now.
Yes blu-ray is not fully adopted yet, yes the prices are high, but they will come down and people will go over. What happens when our tvs go to a higher resolution? Of course they will, my monitor does now. You'll need 50gb or MORE to do that. You simply cannot fit a 1080p movie onto a DVD, it just wont work. Imagine larger..?