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Xbox Price Drops For Australia And Europe
wallitron writes: "Due to slow sales in Australia, Microsoft is looking to drop the price of it's XBox to $399 (around $200US). With a fast CPU, wizzy graphics card, ethernet, DVD and TV out, it would be a handy thing in the living room if it ran a real OS. At that price it seems good value. Check out the article on the price drop." There are price drops in Europe, too.
I thought I read that you can't dump a product on market in EU. That is, they can't sell it for less than the manufacturing costs. Apparently Xbox had at least an extra 100 on the price. For the new cost (299) it'd be almost worth it just for a DVD player.
> it would be a handy thing in the living room if it ran a real OS.
Why would it matter what OS it runs? If it used Linux instead, it wouldn't suddenly have more functionality. It wouldn't suddenly have the ability to open your curtains or turn on your coffee machine. It already does what it's supposed to do: play games.
No console game player should ever care what OS their game system uses.
(I wonder if the Indrema never came to light because they expected gamers to manually mount the DVD drive before playing each game.)
Hoorays for lowering the price of the Xbox unit itself, but what about the games? As a PC gamer enthusiast, the relatively high price of Xbox games at around 100 euros makes me think twice before buying this...thing into my living room. Sure, it's also a DVD player, but most of all, it's a game console, obviously.
I mean, what fun is it, if I have to think about my budget for the whole month when buying a game? I don't want my game buying decision to be a well-thought, rational financial decision, but instead I just want to think whether this game will be entertaining me enough in order to justify the amount of money I'm giving away for it.
The high price of the games takes that fun away, and atleast for me, the Xbox remains on the shelf at the local store, waiting for those game prices to come down.
And really, don't start with that piracy thing and how it really justifies the high price. It doesn't.
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It will be interesting to see what Sony does in response. It's seems clear that they will drop prices in response but the question is how much. The way I see it Sony basically has 2 options. First they can drop their price a bit. Keep their profit margins and try and wait it out hoping the X-box doesn't get too big. Or they can respond with their one big price cut and try and hurt MS bad enough to force them out of the market for good. If Sony is able to force MS out of the consol market that is a huge boon for them because that destroys their major competition, right now Sony is very established in that market and I dno't see them giving any ground without a big fight. MS on the other hand has a lot of cash in the bank (I heard someone say it could run for another 10 years without another dime of revenue?!?) and they have a lot of other interests involved with the sucess of X-box (MS in the living room), it will be interesting to see how far MS decides to stick it out. I think the question is how far will this price war go, I can't see MS dropping the price much more but they are ruthless. If Sony doesn't do something big I think X-box is here to stay, MS ain't cashing in their chips at this point and there will be some very heavy competion in the consol market. It will be very interesting to see what kind of response Sony makes to this price cut. We could end up with anything from a Sony-MS split in consols to a corporate game of chicken.
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One thing I find interesting is that I've repeatedly heard the argument that Microsoft can just throw money at XBox until it succeeds. The whole first-iteration-sucks but the third-one-will-be-good thing Microsoft is famous for.
I don't buy it.
The XBox looks likely to fail. It's getting its ass whipped everywhere but America, and even here the GameCube has started to outsell it despite no strong releases on the GameCube side. When Resident Evil, Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Eternal Darkness, and Star Fox Adventures hit the GameCube (supposedly all this year), Microsoft will need to have some damned strong support on their side to survive just in North America. And, barring some big surprises being revealed at E3, it doesn't look like they have too many great games coming, at least not that will stand up to Zelda and Mario. In any case, no matter how they do here, I think it's very likely that Japan, Europe, and Australia are lost causes.
Suppose they do fail utterly -- they have to discontinue the XBox because people aren't buying it. Now, this is Microsoft, so of course they go back to the drawing board and release the even-more-powerful XBox 2. Twice as powerful as the Playstation 3, say, and a bit cheaper. Sounds great, right? Microsoft can just keep shoveling these things into the market until one of them sticks, the same way they've done with everything else.
Well, no. Firstly, Microsoft's first-party games won't support the XBox 2 by itself. Nintendo is the only game company in the world that can pull that trick off. So the XBox 2 will need third-party support in order to have any games at all, and without games nobody will buy the system, no matter how powerful it is.
Even after the XBox failure, many PC game companies might be willing to port their stuff to the XBox 2 for a quick buck. But can you imagine *anybody* developing exclusive software for the XBox 2, after the complete and utter failure of the XBox? Well, it's not impossible, but the XBox 2 would have to have a lot going for it in order to attract any third-party game companies. The Japanese third-parties, in particular, would be unlikely to touch the thing after the obvious failure of the first. They're leery enough dealing with the first one, and only tremendous work on Microsoft's part got any Japanese support at all.
I'm well aware that Microsoft has deep pockets and can afford to buy game companies outright in order to force them to develop for the XBox 2 -- but that's not the point. They've already bought Bungie, and shovelled money at others, and it doesn't seem to be making a hell of a lot of difference. They need to fix the problem *now*, or it will be far, far more expensive to try to salvage the XBox 2. Microsoft isn't stupid -- they are perfectly well aware that unless they succeed now, it will be *really* expensive to try to make a comeback.
In my view, if the XBox fails, it's all over for Microsoft's game console business. It will be really tough to buy back consumer and third-party confidence after the fiasco that looks to be shaping up.
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