360 price drop went under the radar
 

Didn't see this posted ,

Xbox 360 - was: €349.99 / £249.99 now: €269.99 / £199.99
Xbox 360 Elite - was: €449.99 / £299.99 now: €369.99 / £259.99
Xbox 360 Arcade – was €269.99 / £199.99 now €199.99 / £159.99

taken from Xbox Live's Major Nelson

Yup happening for the release of GTA4 apparantly.

Was on the bbc website yesterday.

Hopefully PS3 will follow now. I think there are a few people with my point of view that I'd be buying PS3 as a movie player that does games rather than a games machine that does movies. Another 50 quid off and I'm in...

I hope not, ive only just bought one!

I doubt is - Now that PS3 has caught up in terms of Monthly sales with 360 in the US and Europe and obviously trounces it in Japan, the PS3 is now selling more worldwide than 360 per month.

I see this as an effort by MS to try and stimulate sales and get back in the lead, but i'm not sure it will have a massive effect.

I don't see the PS3 having to drop to compete - It is already selling better than 360 at a higher price and Sony are notoriously slow at dropping prices.

I agree, Sony still have a lot of catching up to do profit-wise and until they recoup the R&D costs, initial manufacturing set-up / marketing costs I don't think there'll be a substantial price drop. There may be a token gesture at the end of the year to inject demand for the Christmas rush though.
To be honest I don't really see how Microsoft can afford to lower the price of the Xbox 360 considering it has one of the highest fault rates of any piece of electronic equipment ever !!

Because they are in their third year of release and i'd say probably substantially cut production/manufacture costs.

The absense of Bluray is a big issue now

Not really, not everybody wants to watch movies on their console. They'll be offering a bluray addon for those who do.

i think they have lowered the price due to ps3 selling so well, both are great machines i just prefer my xbox lol

Pretty sure Sanyo are dropping the price of the Betamax to compete

:)

To think there are probably some people on here who have no idea what Betamax was, it now holds some sort of iconic status as a great failure even though it was regarded as better than VHS by many.

Yeh but it taught Sony a valuable lesson - buy all the companies that output the media, then you can make up your own formats and force the public to adopt it no matter what !!

Sony are still making a loss on each ps3 sold, they are dependant to recoup this though game sales.

Last year ms were making £75 per xbox sold, probably higher now due to manufacturing costs being further reduced.

Rumour has it ms are working on the 360's replacement anyway.

Work probably started before the 360 was in the shop!

Difference being of course that MS has a absolute huge black hole to fill before it can even think about making a profit.

It has not made a single penny out of the entire Xbox adventure in real terms - Not helped by writing off a further billion dollars with the 360 RROD debacle.

True that didn't help matters, but have a look at sony's finances in the past year or so, they have been hit hard as well with their cd drm fiasco or exploding laptop batteries, not to mention their sales overall have slumped quite a bit.

See it as MS providing a cheap and decent (if a little unreliable) games machine as payback for having to buy everything else at top dollar.

Quite - but the playstation project as a whole has made SOny a sackful of cash.

It doesn't matter either way - MS aren't about to pull out and nor are Sony - I don't really care if they want to sink thier money intoa bottomless pit as long as they both continue to make consoles.

On Play.com you can knock another £10 of each of those prices.

I've read somewhere that the actual price of Blu-Ray players has gone up now that HDDVD has bit the dust.

at work, the ps3 went from
£299 for the console only to
£299 with 2 games (easter deal i think though)