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Xbox for $99? Xbox 2 in 2005?
TimeForGuinness writes "CNN is reporting that Microsoft's Xbox may be on the verge of a substantial price cut, falling from $179 to $99 by Labor Day, and Microsoft will launch its next generation console in late 2005 - a year earlier than has been previously rumored. That would put the Xbox 2 on store shelves up to a full year before Sony's PlayStation 3."
$99? For a hackable XBox? Oh my. I'd seriously go against my better judgement and consider getting one if it dropped that low. MythTV would be so nice on one.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
My first thought upon reading this was, "That's gonna hurt Nintendo, big time."
Nintendo, at least from what I can see, got their big sales kick this season from slashing down the price so that consumers would see it as the most affordable of the third generation consoles. However, that value proposition is going to be dead if the X-Box goes to the $100, or $120 range. I don't think most people have an issue with kicking in an extra $20 for DVD-playing, a hard drive, and a broadband adapter.
Hell, for that price, _I_ might get one.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I personally hope the XBox 2 is fully backwards compatible, including XBox Live functionality.
I use my GBA and PS2 to play old games all the time. If the Gamecube let me, I'd be playing old N64 and Super Nintendo games, too.
$99 is widely known to be the magic number when it comes to the casual consumer and an impulse buy. Nintendo already beat them to that punch last year and during the Christmas season the GameCube sales numbers skyrocketed because of it. If Microsoft can accomplish the same thing, they'll make all the money they need to off of the additional software that they sell.
"Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
That would put the Xbox 2 on store shelves up to a full year before Sony's PlayStation 3.
And we all know that being the first next-gen console to market virtually guarantees success.
You probably shouldn't click this.
Wait, so if the X-box 2 is scheduled to come out sooner, like in 2005, and Halo 2 was supposed to come out late 2004, does this mean that Halo 2 might be pushed back to be released on the X-Box 2? I mean, I'm all for the new technology, but I want my Halo! Sooner the better I think.
I would trust Sony over Microsoft any day of the week/year/decade/etc to provide a level playing field for game developers. And THAT is what will generate great games. Not purchasing the game companies and forcing them to write games for their console and theirs only. ie, owning the game development industry for the console.
Look at the PC sector, Microsoft has been using it's ownership of the platform( the OS ) to gain more and more of the application development base.
Anybody over Microsoft at this point. IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The only thing that really ruined it was the fact that it did not have solid piracy protection. Who's going to make games on a system that everybody can steal? Before that, we saw lots of great games on the Dreamcast.
I totally disagree. The ease of hacking the Dreamcast probably helped more than it hurt. Because:
1. It encouraged hobbiests & geeks (slashdot types) to buy it so that they could play around with some of the neat community hacks, or make their own. Personally I loved the idea of running mame & linux on the DC.
2. It drove up hardware sales because, hey, you can get games for free.
3. It probably even increased the sales of GOOD games because once the hardware is out there, people will buy the good games that they can't get for free, or that they want to support.
Piracy probably hurt the bad games quite a lot, but who cares? Those games were bad anyway.
I believe what killed the Dreamcast wasn't piracy but technical inferiority. The graphics weren't as good as the PS2, it couldn't play back DVDs, and its online support was a joke. (True, the PS2 and Xbox online support was also MIA at the time but at least it was promised to have broadband capability; the DC only had a built-in modem and no broadband capability)
common wisdom has already shown that Microsoft is positioning itself as being in competition with Sony for the top spot, not with Nintendo for second-place. Dropping their price to try to beat Nintendo's second wind growth is highly unlikely.
As is, Microsoft is doing a very good job at getting the attention of hardcore gamers. Quite frankly, Sony has moved 7 PS2s for every Xbox MS moved - and yet they rack up significantly fewer than 7x the game sales each month. It shouldn't even be a remotely fair competition in console software sales month to month for the top 10 spots, and yet it is.
So trying for a huge installed base doesn't really behoove them at this point. Particularly not when they are already losing so much per console, and when Sony is selling loads of consoles to people who frankly aren't buying games. (which is giving them a fairly similar net loss on the hardware)
Sony and MS are in a much tighter competition at this point than anyone expected. They truly don't need to stick their neck out at this point.
That said, if MS bundles dual functionality (eg PVR capability) in the neXtBox, they likely might see the type of insane early-adoption that Sony saw with its dvd player functionality. PVR in 2005, like DVD in 2001, is functionality people want, but aren't willing to pay a high unit price to acquire. If one can capture an early lead, the risk can pay off. But without such killer functionality, MS would likely win few converts, lose people who are holding out for a bigger/better/faster PS3, and would more likely suffer Sega's fate.
Without an ace up their sleeve, some technology that people are clamoring for at consumer price levels, a 2005 release by MS is highly unlikely.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Personally the price of the consoles is not the issue, its the quality of games for the consoles that I look at. I don't care what the price of the console is if the games suck then I won't buy it. When it comes to game quality I think the xbox has them all beat. Halo2,DoomIII,Fable,Ninja Gaiden, this is what I would look at if I were in the market to buy a console. Others don't even have the power to play these games.
Microsoft, certainly, is in a much stronger position than Sega (in reference to the early Dreamcast launch). The Xbox's buzz factor is on the rise - and will soar higher if the company opts for a $99 price tag.
FINANCIALLY Microsoft is in stronger position then Sega was, otherwise not really. From a support and development perspective Sega had a lot of large third party companies (particularly Japanese third parties) supporting the Dreamcast. Additionally, the Xbox buzz factor isn't that "hot" either. The system is in a tight race in the US and Europe with Nintendo over second place in those markets (while a distant third worldwide) and is for all intents and purposes dead in the all important Japanese market. Microsoft is also taking a signficant loss on every Xbox system they sell which has not been recouped by game and licensed peripheral sales.
There are also questions around the gaming industry on the retail side of the industry about potentially inflated sales numbers already from Microsofts camp. Microsoft refurbishes their own used systems and resells them to retailers such as EBgames, Gamestop and GameCrazy. This differs from Nintendo and Sony's approach in which "refurbished" systems are handled by the companies that distribute them, not by the manufacturer. Former Microsoft reps have leaked the word out that Microsoft was counting refurb systems sales as new sales until recently, meaning that many Xbox systems were listed as being sold twice.
There are also questions about inflated Xbox live numbers as many of the Xbox live subscribers are on free subscriptions that come with software rather then paying subscribers.
With regards to the Xbox 2/next coming out in 2005, I believe that is in fact a possibility. But the Xbox being dropped to 99.99 in the imminent future (or before Sony does so) seems highly unlikely. Microsoft is already taking a much bigger loss on their hardware then Sony. It's hard to imagine them running up an even deeper deficeit merely to move into a distant second place in the US and Europe.
For the price of one Dual G5 2.0GHz PowerMac, assuming $99/Xbox, you can buy 30 Xboxes.
The mac has Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5, 512MB DDR400 128-bit SDRAM, 160GB Serial ATA disk, a DVD burner, an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with 64MB, GigE, a 56k modem, 800Mbps firewire, and USB 2.0. 30 Xboxs have 30 733MHz P3s, I believe 64MB per system for a total of 1920MB memory but I forget what kind, 8*30 for 240GB of total disk space, 30 DVD-ROMs, NVidia GEforce graphics (not at all irrelevant in the cluster; you can offload mathematics processing to the GPU with the proper libraries, as was reported here a little while back), 100Mbps networking, and USB 1.1.
Assuming your supercomputing tasks can be broken down into bite size chunks (which can be handled in 64MB) the Xbox solution will be much cheaper for the same amount of processing power, but will take up much more space and consume much more power (30 hard drives for example, even 8GB ones, will consume about as much power as the one hard drive in the Mac.)
Xboxes are a decent choice for a small Linux cluster. You can even use the Cromwell BIOS and you're not even violating copyright law. Pick up one refurbished PC from geeks.com for $500 or so to be the cluster master, and 20 Xboxes or so, and you have some fairly significant processing power available to you. However, with 1U dual opteron systems down to about two grand with similar disk/memory to the powermac, if you want to build a cluster of Linux systems, there are probably more cost-effective ways to go about it than using Xboxes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"