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.

Comments

EU regs?

[olman]

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.

What about the games

[Zarathustra.fi]

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.

Sony's Response

[quantaman]

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.