Europe gets Xbox 360 price cut Comments by Ellie Gibson

Really though, if you're not into gaming enough to play a system then no price is going to attract you.

i think they're making a sensible move to make it affordable, at last, before Christmas.

Too true bog_head.
They could also chuck in an effective marketing campaign with the price drop.
Can't see that happening though.

Marketing is where they are utterly failing.

VP2 was just sent out to die, they did nothing to promote a fantastic game. Rare have every right to be very pissed off with them.

I think I am going to hand them out as XMas gifts now.

Have to agree on the VP2, Microsoft have once again shown their complete inability to market anything that isn't a shooter or a driving game. VP2 deserves a really good marketing push as it's a really great game, unfortunatly once again it's gonna be completly ignored because most people won't even know it exists.

I might pick up a Premium at this price for a back up and a larger hardrive.

MS, tell me when I can get a Jasper and then I'll by one. Simple really.

"History shows that the majority of console sales happen after this price point has been breached, and we're well positioned to take advantage of this mass market pricing."

Yes, but those were popular consoles, not ill manufactured crap with a hardcore image. MS's wishful thinking with regards to price is getting pathetic.

First time I see some (few though, at least that...) ppl bitching because something is less expensive. Fuckin hilarious!

yea but they were popular consoles because of the price

Les only comments MS news, he has nigthmares with litle windows and gates.

I feel like buying a second one so I can have one in the front room and one in the bedroom. Maybe one to go in the bathroom as well for some quality "geometry wars while shitting" action.

Les posting negative comments in a Microsoft related story?? Surely fucking not!

I'm just waiting for Les to start talking about MS shareholders, without actually posting any facts to back up his points...

It's simple really, if you're a gamer and you don't own and won't now buy an Xbox 360 then what the hell are you playing at? Reliability blah, noise meh, shooters only blah. Just chuffing buy one and enjoy it like the rest of the Xbox 360 community do. Doesn't mean you have to love your PS2, PS3 or Wii any less ;-)

Look at all the SDF making this out tp be a bad thing, the slowness of the 360's price cuts has really hindered them this generation and that was almost certainly down to having to fork out for the RROD issue. Now they have reliable hardware they can start pumping it out to the masses.

The 360 is a clever design, the arcade without a HD is little more than a circuit board with a cheap DVD drive, it can and will go lower in price than the original xbox. MS then bump up the cost by adding margin the accessories exactly like Sony did with PS1 and Ps2 (£30 memory card anyone?).

"yea but they were popular consoles because of the price"

No they weren't. You make the same mistake as MS: overestimating the impact of price. Wii wil continue to outsell 360 easily despite a higher price point. Price is irrelevant if people don't want what you're offering. And the masses have made it pretty clear they don't want a 360, they want a Wii.

"I'm just waiting for Les to start talking about MS shareholders, without actually posting any facts to back up his points..."

lol

Now MS did exactly the same which Sony did with PSX. Constantly bring the price down till some point.

But 5 times quicker!

"I'm going to buy ten, and then make a table out of 360s for my 360 to sit on"

Can you imagine the noise? a 747 would not touch that.

@Les

I think you are underestimating the impact of price to be honest. There comes a point where the price means people start thinking, "well sure its only... i'll give it a shot"

Lets just agree to disagree eh?

Also the reason Sony won't do a price cut is because they can't. Including the blu ray drive and the cell chip in the PS3's hardware design was a massive mistake. Yes the PS3 is selling ok but will it ever sell in the same numbers as the PS2? I doubt it but I suspect if they hadn't used such exotic hardware the price would already be down to £200 and so instead of just slightly selling more than MS in Europe they would be trouncing them.

Sony are still suffering for the decisions made during the hardware design phase (which, of course, MS have also suffered from too).

the arcade being a waste of time is utter rubbish my friend who is relatively new to games doesnt have an hdd and has done nearly a year without one at some point shes going to have to get one but seriously the arcade is a very viable option for casuals and people not really into the whole online gaming thing...and believe me a bunch of people just dont care about online games.

the arcade is definately an awesome (cheap) entry point into gaming and is in no way shape or form just a "circuit board"
you have to remember the people that have their interest peaked when it hits £130/170... are mostly the casuals anyways

@ moggsy

I'm trying to keep to just one box under the TV, regardless of price!

@ seamonsterneil

yeah, if I was to get one, I wouldn't want the cruddy low price point version, because just like the Wii, you'd have to bolt on loads of accessories to get it up to speed.

Only because LBP is coming around am I now not begrudging having to fork out £23 for a DS3... means I can give the madam the non-vibe model for co-op fun!

"I think you are underestimating the impact of price to be honest. There comes a point where the price means people start thinking, "well sure its only... i'll give it a shot"

Only if people decide to not buy something because of the price. But if they're not interested in it in the first place, price drops don't matter. The price difference between 360 and Wii (before this drop) wasn't big enough to explain the huge sales lead of Wii as being down to its lower price.

But fine, let's disagree. ;)

'Also the reason Sony won't do a price cut is because they can't. Including the blu ray drive and the cell chip in the PS3's hardware design was a massive mistake'

you could argue the one of the major missions of the ps3 was to push blu-ray over hd-dvd- and in that sense they have won that war - so i wouldnt call that a massive mistake

Considering my aims to have a one box mission, the combo of games machine, bluray player, upscaling DVD player, wireless/divx player, media player all in box is a wonderful hardware design. Yes, its expensive, but bloody worth it. Its a shame that PlayTV isn't worked into one box (and if it is, I will be trading in my 60gb model!).

Maybe a mega one with a surround decoder built into it too next time too? ;D

Completely silent fan for media modes next time though, gets a bit lairy when upscaling DVD for my liking.

"Also the reason Sony won't do a price cut is because they can't."

Of course they can. They rather won't because it will eat into their profits/increase their losses but if the 360 price cut threatens to put the 360 ahead in Europe, you can bet Sony will drop the price. But TBH, I don't think it will make much of a difference (except for the next two weeks of course ;) ).

I think Howard Stringer has put a stop on any further PS3 price cuts for at least a while, hence Sony beating around the bush by messing around with Hard drive sizes.

Demand for the 360 at these prices will be immense, imagine a gears of war 2 ad with "now from £129.99", les can dismiss it all he wants but the 360 will sell gang busters this Christmas

Firstly, the real winner here is the consumer. I wouldn't personally buy a 360 because it's yesterday's technology (no built-in wi-fi or hi-def disc system? what's that all about?) but for a lot of people there's no doubt that the 360 represents good value for money.

The Arcade model remains just a PR exercise to have a really console though. Ok, it is possible to play any game you can buy on the high street on it but it's next to useless if you want to go online and download things. Who really in their right mind would buy one when for just £30 more they could have a 60GB HD? In fact, they wouldn't even be saving £30 as they'd have to buy a memory card anyway.

And as others have said on here, it seems like Microsoft's main strategy against the competition is to keep dropping the price but the PS3 has been almost consistently been outselling the 360 all year even at a higher price. It would be interesting if that continues after this price drop. I'm sure Sony will be monitoring this closely before deciding on any price drop themselves but I think we can be sure they'll avoid any knee-jerk reaction. A £250 PS3 before Christmas would put the cat among the pigeons though.

I like cats

widge- does the ps3 get louder when playing divx's from the HDD?
(how mouch louder?) I'm thinking of replacing my XBMC soon and a PS3 would be a good option.
Does it play all DivX's, Xvids and AVi's these days? how about ubtitle support for my jap/chinese films?

I think seeing how people are having to spend so much on just living, the 360 has a great chance over the others. You think parents and kids are going to fork out for a £300 PS3 and then you might have a damn hard to find Wii. 360 has a chance of getting all those people.

Microsoft also needs to release a statement saying the new Jasper is shipping. That means everyone will get over the RROD and feel safe buying one.

@Widge

I agree that if you are on a "one box mission" for media and gaming then the PS3 is the one to buy as the 360 is too noisy for me to use as a media player. However at this price why deny yourself the 360's excellent (dare I say it...arguably superior) games catalogue ?

@mingster - the ps3 has handled every file i've thrown at it - including hd mkv's divx etc etc, it's virtually silent when playing off the hdd and I've found it a great replacement for xmbc (subtitles work fine too) - tbh i think its worth the asking price as a media player alone

All round smart move. Bundle in the casual games at round that price with a good marketing campaign and MS will be laughing... Not as hard as Ninty, but still a lot louder than Sony. The Japanese giant will have to respond.

" I wouldn't personally buy a 360 because it's yesterday's technology "

"no hi-def disk system. what's that all about" - yep.. utterly essential to gaming that one.

you don't half talk some shit.

lol.

I've not watched anything off the HDD for a bit. In general, it sometimes bumps up a notch, but I've noticed performance change over the various firmware updates. Its a bit more intelligent now. So it bumps up, but goes down again after a bit. In the past it use to go up a notch and just stay there. Not the same speed it gets up to when you game for quite a bit though.

I am picky though, I consider any fan noise is fan noise too much.

I think it is good for most DivX's. I've heard that it might have an issue with some that used packed bitstreams (I've also heard this happens on some DivX DVD players too). You can get a tool that unpacks them nice and quickly though.

I've done my own rip using AutoGK and its fine with that. MKV files you just bung through mkv2vob (nice simple GUI on this program) and it dumps out an mp4, all HD and lovely!

As soon as I discovered the media streaming, I was sold on this. I'd be grabbing an episode of 24, having to bung through vso for a good couple of hours. Big waste of money really. Now I'm just doing it all off the cuff pretty much and in HD. mkv2vob is certainly the way to go!

I will copy my own rip of Shrek to the HDD, I did it at maximum quality and full AC3 sound and give you a run down of how it sounds fanwise.

I like dogs

When did it happen that a price drop suddenly became a bad thing?

I won't benefit from the price drop because I was an early adopter so price drops mean nothing to me.

However, for parents who are wanting to buy consoles for their children this Christmas, if it's a choice of one console for £150 and another for £300, and both basically play the same games at basically the same quality (forget exclusives etc because neither actually have many exclusives worth playing let's face it) then they would likely choose the 360, what sort of rational consumer would do otherwise? That is of course unless they were interested in a Bluray player.

Thing is, people who are wanting one of these consoles at this point are likely not interested in Bluray. We spend our time reading games websites, of course we're early adopters to new technology, those who are buying a console now which has been out for between 2 and 3 years are obviously not that interested in being on the pinnacle of technology.

On saying that, if PS3 drops its price, my bonus might be spent badly on a third console...

'you could argue the one of the major missions of the ps3 was to push blu-ray over hd-dvd- and in that sense they have won that war - so i wouldnt call that a massive mistake'

Yes, they won that war but the question still remains - was it a war worth winning?

''I wouldn't personally buy a 360 because it's yesterday's technology (no built-in wi-fi or hi-def disc system? what's that all about?) but for a lot of people there's no doubt that the 360 represents good value for money.''

And up to this point in time, how exactly has either of those terrible omissions affected the GAMES?
Silly, silly fanboy.
Ohh and when posting fanboy rants disguised as the comments of a normal person you might want to check your facts. The Arcade system comes with memory.

penguin_overlord

the 60gig model is £40 more and the arcade includes a 256mb memory card so is not far off a PS2 price once you add that into the Ps2's cost

Of the 360 catalogue that I miss its the jRPGs and perhaps Halo 3. Its the entire "of things that interest me" disclaimer!

Luckily I've got a gaming laptop so Mass Effect, Gears and stuff can sit on that if I want, plus its portable. Looking at the future though, good few RPGs coming out, my pre-order £age is over the £200 mark. I've not finished off loads of games so I can't really justify another console.

Maybe in the future though, I mean I got my xbox for £60 with 5 games late on, promptly enjoyed Shenmue 2 and Halo 2. Next gen, if MS make some slinky do all box, bluray, silent, the works as standard ... perhaps some consideration.

My earlier post that has attracted quite a lot of "flaming" for some reason was just trying to point out to the fanboys who think microsoft are so good and sony are so bad that without competition there would be no price drops. Simply put microsoft have a stranglehold on the pc market and look what that has cost us over the years. They pay millions fpor exclusive dc that should be on the disc anyway and then no one else can have it unless you buy there console.(which i repeat i have one of)
All these console makers need to survive or else we will all be priced out of the market. simple as that. so if this price cut forces sonys hand then good i am all for it never said i wasnt

Holy crap, I'm going to have to buy one now.

'Next gen, if MS make some slinky do all box, bluray, silent, the works as standard ... perhaps some consideration. '

I suspect next gen will be download only with no optical media drive. Coming to a store near you in 2010.

People are interested in bluray though. Loads of casual types, going out and buying their fancy flat thin TVs, getting their Sky HD to give them the high def footy, their iPhone with beer drinking application fun thing, the word is out about a high def DVD player doohicky and its bluray. The average bod is a lot more gadget inclined than before. It could factor in the decision regardless of the price. I've got my nice HD TV and I want my bluray to go in it. Some people could see the loss of HD-DVD as some betamax scenario and think "oh hey, thats the technology that is going out" and associate that with the 360.

@Widge: I've yet to see any sign of hordes of people interested in that stuff. It just hasn't been a "must have" in the way that DVD did to boost the PS2.

The fact the the players are getting cheap enough means they might just get one of those if they're really bothered about that.

The current financial climes are likely to hurt sales of a lot of this high end stuff too.

ok, big hard drive, no optical but SILENT. This applies to both MS and Sony.

Although I reckon optical will still be here. If only for this reason:

http://gizmodo.com/5048025/giz-explains-...

apart from the fact that even with downloads available, people love owning something tangible.

@ Widge: the big chunck of the "mass market" of gaming consoles are aimed at school kids who care very little for Blu Ray movies. Diferent targets, I guess.
I can only talk about what I see here in Lisbon, but Blu Ray is close to non-existant. They are usually placed side by side with vinyl records, a very, very niche group.