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PS2 Price May Fall, Gamecube Staying Put
mrquackers writes: "Looks like the price war in the console gaming world is starting a bit early. With Microsoft expected to announce a drop in the price of the Xbox to $199 next Monday at E3, Sony's rumored to be cutting PlayStation 2 prices as early as tomorrow. Meanwhile, Nintendo says it won't be making ANY price cuts before or during the show -- though it's not ruling one out for later in the year." Update: 05/14 18:01 GMT by T : An anonymous reader points out this CNN story indicating that the PS2 cut is official.
GameCube is more for kids, whatever Nintendo tries.
Yup, little kide love romping around a dark stormy mansion with a shotgun trying to blow a zombie's head off while they get bitten into, blood splattering, screaming and struggling until they fall onto the floor and a huge puddle of blood surrounds them.
Yup, kids are covered.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Where does this crap about Microsoft losing hundreds of dollars per console come from? Retarded slashdotnomics? The XBox is definitely not several hundreds of dollars worth of parts, especially for a manufacturer buying hundreds of thousands of each component. Integrated components are scores cheaper than non-integrated components. A processor slow by current standards on a fully integrated motherboard with a hard drive easily produced and procured from several different sources lacking price gouging components like speakers, a monitor, or a KB/mouse combo all make for a pretty inexpensive machine to build. A bare bones PC costs about as much as an XBox and they use more exepensive components. Besides Microsoft isn't paying the beaucoup fees to ship units overseas, they have manufacturing plants on the three continents they sell XBoxes on.
Console makers have always taken a loss on the initial batches of the consoles as a matter of course, the games were the money makers. Half of the cost of a new game goes back into the pockets of whoever makes the console. It costs a bit of money to have that Sony Entertainment or Nintendo logo pop up when the game starts. The consoles merely existed to play the games on. When a console maker hit black they'd drop the price of the console to just above cost and soak up the profit from licensing. Sony has been making a profit off the PS2 for a while now because with the XBox aiming at the same demographics the price of the PS2 hasn't needed to drop. They've sold millions of PS2s and made many more millions off all the blockbuster games for it. Microsoft might be taking a small loss or just operating on a razor thin margin with the XBox but they're not losing hundreds of dollars per freaking console.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Say, aren't we supposed to boycott Sony for screwing up our iMacs?
;)
I guess you didn't get the new revised itinerary...sorry!!
Anyway, the new schedule is:
Monday: Boycott Sony/MPAA
Tuesday: Relax, check out new tech products and video games.
Wednesday: Boycott RIAA, Call congresscritters over latest atrocious bill.
Thursday: Relax, check out the latest CDs coming on the market.
Friday: Boycott the MPAA in the daytime, go see a movie at night.
Saturday & Sunday: Pretend we have lives outside of work and don't post on Slashdot.
The only question remaining for the XBox and Microsoft is whether or not the XBox can be a viable product in only 1 of the 3 major consoles markets. Japan and Europe are over for the XBox. For whatever reason people in those two major markets didn't buy the XBox. And once a product flops as badly as the XBox has in those markets, it is difficult, if not impossible to recover.
Points of fact:
(1) Halo sold a mere 5,000 copies in the most recent week in Japan. The most of any XBox title.
(2) Following its hugely successful launch in Europe, Nintendo is dominating the software charts there and will most likely easily slip into the "PS2 alternative" slot which the XBox had coveted.
(3) Recent data shows the Cube outselling the XBox in the US.
The larger implications of the XBox having failed in both Europe and Japan are that third party game support will soon trickle away. It simply won't make economic sense for game makers to support the XBox when its only market is a small piece of the US pie. Microsoft has managed to bribe/buy out/conjole a tepid welcome for the XBox after its launch and through the next 6 months. But once those game makers see how badly the box is selling, that support will quickly fade away.
The hard truth really is quite simple for Microsoft: the XBox will _never_ succeed with only a portion of the US market. Without 3rd party support the XBox is DEAD.