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Xbox 360 Price Drop In Europe
Microsoft today confirmed that they are dropping the price of the Xbox 360 in Europe. Starting Friday 14th March, price drops for all the current SKUs will take place, taking the Arcade SKU to £159.99/€199.99, the Premium SKU to £199.99/€269.99, and the Elite SKU to £259.99/€369.99.
These price drops are quite aggressive for Europe, as now the Arcade version of the console is cheaper than a Nintendo Wii, and retailers here in this swing territory will entice customers with special deals, often going below these new RRPs. No price drops for other territories have been announced yet, but it is probably on the cards, with rumours stating that Microsoft wants to knock money off their systems in North America before the release of the hotly anticipated GTAIV.
Furthermore, the consoles are now cheap enough for people to basically trade in their older models that are more prone to the red ring of death and other issues, without losing too much money. The new models have improved motherboards and power consumption, as well as 65nm CPUs that help to make the system run cooler. This was probably not in Microsoft's plan, but us gamers are a clever bunch, and being able to run on improved hardware for little loss of money works for everyone.
The greatest mistake that MS did was not dropping the price down when the Wii came out. Their second mistake is not dropping the price down when the PS3 was down but not out.
XBox 360 could have won it all but now they have a situation where the Wii have beaten them and PS3 is back in the game. If the current sale trends continue the Xbox 360 will be in third place in a year or two.
Peter Moore was smart to leave MS. He saw the ship sinking and in some way, it was his fault.
Posted by jdun at March 10, 2008 9:21 PMPlease keep your comments relevant to this entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.