Xbox 360 Elite price cut to £199 News

Shame they won't drop the price of the stupid wireless converter as £60 is a royal rip

Will the Elite still be black? If so, they'll have moved almost completely away from their original colour choice. Not that it bothers me, I think the black console looks better.

Gnort, white is so turn of the century darling!

^

Yes, my thought also. Black is new white in AV land tho I think?

\hugs 360 Elite

They're removing the HDMI cable? Why on earth..?

I like "price-drop-tennis".
If this forces Sony's hand to dropping the Slim to sub£200 by xmas, I'd be in!

@mkreku- cost of course

Why drop the HDMI cable though? Its worth around £20 retail but probably has bugger all manufacturing costs. Why not just take out the old Component and replace with the HDMI unit, that'll save any extra cost.

"Pro gaming tip: Wireless will get you killed."

I assume you mean because of lag? Your home broadband connection is the bottleneck, being far slower than wifi or ethernet. If your wifi network isn't stable, its probably your router of your environment. Wifi is fine if setup properly.

Surely the 360 Elite isn't going to come bundled with a bloody composite cable?
If its going to come with the component cable that the Premium originally did, that must cost more to include than an HDMI?
I guess MS are thinking that a lot of their customers still don't have HDMI equipped TV's and with the Elite now the 'main' unit they have to make sure this works for everyone straight off the bat.

Does the Arcade have the chrome disc drive and wireless controller? Doesn't that essentially make it the (white) Pro, without the hard drive?

I wonder if, when my Pro dies, I can just grab an Arcade and end up with the exact same setup.

So all the consoles are now SD only out of the box? So much for the HD generation.:-P

"Pro gaming tip: Wireless will get you killed."

I assume you mean because of lag? Your home broadband connection is the bottleneck, being far slower than wifi or ethernet. If your wifi network isn't stable, its probably your router of your environment. Wifi is fine if setup properly."

Is he not talking about the cancer?

@woodnotes

Ahhhh. When he wrote pro gamer, I didn't realise that was code for "frequent contributor to the Lancet".

How the hell can the Arcade model be only £40 cheaper than the Elite, it's insane to think anyone would buy it.

I thought they might be doing this, though they're doing it sooner than I expected - though if this is UK only, maybe they're testing the waters here. I was debating whether Microsoft would choose dropping the price or dropping the live subscription fee. We were concluding that from a business point of view, Live is more attractive, and so thought a price-drop would be more likely. After all, only one in four has to have a Live subscription for four years in order to compensate for this price drop.

The other problem is that unless MS changed the engineering then those who want to put sound out whilst using HDMI now HAVE to buy the overpriced MS version of the HDMI cable and audio adapter. Which is about £25+. /fail

What? Why? I'm just using a cheap HMDI cable for both audio and video on the 360. Why would you need a special MS HDMI cable and audio adapter?

Considering that this is EUROgamer, it would be nice if there was a price in euros as well. Not that I can't take an accurate guess, it's $ == € after all. ¬_¬

this couldn't have come at a better time for me. good gcse results means new 360 :)

"Shame they won't drop the price of the stupid wireless converter as £60 is a royal rip "

For those wanting this, there is a very interesting tip on the forum.

if it end up as €=$ the its the same as the ps3

I've always been very objective when it comes to consoles and have been somewhat bemused at the Sony loyalty calling everyone else an xbot when Sonys clear major fuck ups have been pointed out to them.

Well in this case I have to say that MS have fucked up so much with this pricing it will end up on wikipedia!

£170 was the tipping point for a load of friends to get a 360 and MS get rid of it! And, no they wouldn't have been willing to spend an extra £30 for another 60GB of storage.

£50 lower than the PS3 is not enough. For me personally it's all about the games and I made my choice a few years back. Other people have different needs though.

Raising the Arcade to only £10 less than the system you WAS selling with a 60GB HDD, a headset and HD cable is fucking laughable, although I do suspect they don't sell that many and probably don't give a shit.

Deary me. You watch this radically changed once two months of sales data have been released. Mark my words.

"So all the consoles are now SD only out of the box? So much for the HD generation.:-P"

Doesn't it come with component cables? Component is HD......

Lol. Maybe its just my lack of install ability but after 3 different routers i got annoyed at the frequent disconnects, low to no signal strength, and my brother moaning that his 512kps was gimped to 56kps.

U.S. pricedrop official too, though less aggressive (Elite at $299, which is the same as the PS3 Slim). I'm thinking that there are still a lot of Pros in the channel that need to be cleared first (Pro now $249)

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press...

Small tidbit in that article that I didn't know about yet:

1 Xbox LIVE Gold Membership will be required for Twitter and Facebook when they are available, and is required for Netflix. Games, media content and Netflix membership are sold separately; a hard drive is required for storage.

"Doesn't it come with component cables? Component is HD....." God. People still dont know this? I remember shit like "you cant do 1080 over component, only hdmi can..."

"I assume you mean because of lag? Your home broadband connection is the bottleneck, being far slower than wifi or ethernet. If your wifi network isn't stable, its probably your router of your environment. Wifi is fine if setup properly."

Sorry but the way wireless technology works, it isn't a even close to mimicking cat5e wiring. You may be able to create an optimal environment that gives the idea that it's a good connection but that still doesn't come close to wired and most environments don't get close to such optimal circumstances.

It's not a matter of speed, it's a matter of signal noise & dropped signals. Not an issue in most things but definitely not something you would want to use when playing twitch shooters against people who are really good.

Not to mention that besides being a fuckload faster, 1gb wired equipment is also a fuckload cheaper.

@Domovoi: Because some people might want to send the video to the TV via HDMI and the sound to their AMP via an optical cable.... like me

BazFrag

Couldn't agree more ethernet or nothing for me. But want one for my girlfriend gave her my old pro when I got an elite and no way of getting an ethernet cable to it in her lounge so want a wireless one just so I can get her online for marketplace etc.

@Negotiator

"How the hell can the Arcade model be only £40 cheaper than the Elite, it's insane to think anyone would buy it."

I think that is the point. MS want everyone to buy the Elite, so you drop the price of the Elite and push up the price of the Arcade at the same time, reducing the margin and giving everyone incentive to just stump up the extra £40.


@Bazfrag

I've had mixed results with routers. I used to have a Linksys that did a great job. The previous one (a D-link or maybe Belkin, I forget) was not so hot and was never happy with my 360 wifi.

I currently have a T-Link from ebuyer, dead cheap and one of the best I've come across. Currently everything is in the same room though, so its hard to be sure. The Linksys kept a stable 54 connection to my 360 and PC through 2 floors, so its hard not to recommend it on that basis.

360 is fine, but really what's with the wi-fi? and the noise :)

@Xerx3s

Ah well, I guess I've been lucky with environments then. I had all sorts of issues a few years ago in a previous house, but I've not had problems in my last two places so I figured the tech had just got better (except with my current PC, but that is using a £5 usb wifi adapter off ebay, which I am 2 steps from throwing out of the window).

On that note, if anyone has a cheapish USB wifi adapter they can recommend, I'm all ears.

"remember the ps3 needs large space because a lot of games have forced installs and 360s all work of the disc"

But you can install 360 games to the drive also now, which anyone with the room to do so will take advantage of to keep the system noise down.

That reminds me, wasn't part of the latest update a tweak that reduced install sizes? About damn time (/is still clinging onto original 20GB drive, and wallet).

Now I remember. The ropey router I had was Netgear... assuming anyone cares.

Nooo, I have a Netgear!

The removal of the HDMI cable with the Elite means that anyone wanting to use HDMI and route DD5.1 sound through their older non-HDMI surround sound amps will have use a cheap third-party HDMI lead and fork out extra for the optical out adaptor (can be found on eBay for around £13) or buy the overpriced official Xbox 360 HDMI cable at £30+ which comes with the adaptor.

Have owned both (but sold my 360) and have to say that the ps3 at 50 quid more is a more tempting proposition - especially if you want to connect to the net by wi fi and play the occasional game online (and goes without saying if you have any interest in BR).

@mkreku

Hey, if its working fine then don't worry. My probs were years ago, so their firmware is probably more accomodating now.

so. 199 + HDMI and gold live sub = same as PS3? price wise right?

bottom line is that ppl still look at the price and the xbox is still cheaper.

@kangaratoo
Picked one up for £17 in maplins. "Micronet".. lol. Works fine though. No doubt you can order online for cheaper still.

When the public go into a shop all they'll notice is there is a significant price difference between the slim and the elite. This will to some degree affect the impact of sonys recent price drop.

This won't affect the dork who aready has a PS3 but 'must have' the latest one or Xbox owners who finaly see the PS3 approaching an affordable price.

@themorganator

"Blu Ray's going to die as everyone moves to digital downloads, so where is your argument?"

Yeah I can't wait to start those 22gb downloads over my 10mb net connection and have my net connection snarled up for days.

Methinks your argument is based around 5-10 years in the future, sir.

^ truth

I need to switch to O2 broadband first in order to "stream & download" ... Virgin just goes into meltdown after 5GB of data. laughable

@ps3owner - why? I've had no problems with virgin. Granted they do have caps on usage during the day, but then that's what the 50mb offer is for... no shaping, 50 down, 1.5 up.

Looks more like prices have been increased to me. If you ignore the Arcade/Pro/Elite names then what they've essentially done is drop the high-end SKU and put prices up for the low-end and mid-range SKUs. The only added value is the increased HDD size, minus the HDMI cable.

However you look at it the barrier for entry has been raised.