Xbox 360 Price Drop: $200, is it the magic number?
Filed under: Gaming, Xbox 360 | By: Daniel
Posted on: September 4, 2008 | 3 Comments
While it’s my opinion that both the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 have their own advantages, and both these next-gen gaming machines have their place in the future…there is still only one winner.
Many gamers and analysts believe that there is a magic number when it comes to the price of a games console and the amount of units sold, some analysts have reported detailed information on the history of sales and a figure that when reached increases the uptake of the hardware massively.
This seems to be common knowledge, and the current figure being reported for a games console to take a massive leap in sales is $200. The Xbox 360 has just gone below the $200 mark after its latest price drop.
Is this now the magic number for the 360, will this be the moment the 360 gains market share faster than ever before? Let us know in the comments.
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Yes, this will be the point where the 360 sales start accelerating. Christmas 2008, especially, will be good to the 360, as the PS3 is still a bit out of the price range of gift for the kids for a lot of households, especially considering a soft economic consumer confidence (at least here in the U.S.). A major factor in the potential success of the no-hard drive $199 version is that online play does not generally require a hard drive, and the 256MB card the system comes with is plenty large enough for any online (and most offline) storage needs.
Now if Microsoft really wants to push this thing, they need to include the ability to support external USB hard drives on the 360. Even if they need to format the drive in a proprietary format as they do with the current hard drives, it would let users consider the low end 360 a forward-looking purchase. Right now the cost of buying the hard drive down the road is quite steep since you have to buy Microsoft’s drive or nothing. That’s not how to win this thing, MS… Not when the PS3 lets you use both external drives and easily swap out the internal 2.5″ drive with any SATA drive you want (I bought a faster, quieter Hitachi 160GB for $100 and swapped out my old 20GB drive on my launch day PS3 - if I could buy a USB drive enclosure for that 20GB drive and plug it in as an external drive to a 360 Arcade, I’d probably buy one for the bedroom for the Netflix movies).
Lower price is always a good thing.
Microsoft Japan is already actually paying people to take the machines, with little success. “We hope more people will be able to enjoy Xbox 360,” said marketing marketer Takashi Sensui, “and we can stop enjoying quite so many of them. We also have this fine pile of HD-DVD drives … Wait! Come back!” http://notnews.today.com/?p=63
Well from my perspective it will increase sales - I thought I would never move my gaming to a console but the price drop is what moved me over. I would expect that to happen to many others as well.