Slashdot Mirror
Xbox Price Drop To $149 Now Official
bpitzer writes "It's official - Microsoft is cutting the price on the Xbox to $149, effective tomorrow, according to CNET News. Now, will Sony follow suit on the PS2? And how long until the next price drop? Maybe at this year's E3, making three in a row?" We previously reported on rumors to this effect, and other readers point to the official Microsoft press release, sporting a quote from noted tech analyst P.Diddy: "[I] believe that the system's cultural
influence as a social entertainment brand has only just begun."
they also dropped the price in canada to $199 CDN
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Here's some links from an almost-submitted post.
Microsoft Cuts Xbox Price to $150
Microsoft has cut the price of its Xbox game console to about $150 ($149.99), a $30 drop. The price cut was widely expected by analysts in a move to spur slowing console sales for the Xbox as the current generation approaches the end of its cycle, and gamers anticipate the next-generation of consoles in 2005. Microsoft also announced several price cuts on Xbox games and titles including 'Xbox Music Mixer, Project Gotham Racing 2 and Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge.' More coverage at CNet, CNN Money, ZDNet UK, AP via Seattle PI and Bloomberg via Seattle Times. (Microsoft press release)
Absolutely!. Mmm: cheap webservers....
The article also mentions a PlayStation 2 price drop in mid-April, so don't buy an X-Box based on price just yet.
No. Microsoft pays a fixed amount of money per chip to nVidia, Intel etc. They might have been able to cut something on the DVD-drives and harddrives, but manufacturing 8Gb-drives isn't cheap if you need to sustain a whole factory line just for one customer.
The reason MS is in bed with ATI for the next system is because nVidia didn't agree to suggested price cuts by Microsoft.
You're also wrong on the GPU. It's a Geforce 3 with an extra Vertex Shader, like the Geforce 4.
it's in my head
Got news for you...all console makers sell their product below cost, and have for many years
Congratulations, you've fallen for a myth. The only consoles before the Xbox to have been sold at a loss are the Sega Saturn and the Sega Dreamcast.
Please don't post myths - learn how to use Google.
it's in my head
Check your facts before posting. No xbox mod-chip costs more than $100.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Not sure why this is "insightful" rather than "funny". After all Xbox modchips can be found with installation for $45.
If you can borrow 007 Agent under Fire, MechAssault or Splinter Cell (the first one) and a memorycard from someone, you can with two additional small soldering blobs hack your Xbox at no cost at all.
http://www.xbox-scene.com
it's in my head
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Nintendo and Sony at worst always broke even, up until very recently, neither had EVER sold a console at a loss. Nintendo is(or was before resuming manufacturing) now selling at a very minimal loss at their $99 price point.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Ah, but see, mine is from when you had a firebutton on the joystick base which you hit, not directly on, but with the side of the thumb. I remember times when it felt like the end of my thumb was going to fall off, the joint hurt so bad.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yeah, I usually don't start with an insult, but you're an idiot.
Microsoft isn't lowering the price of their system because they "care" about consumers and want everyone to drink from their goblet... they just want everyone to drink from their goblet whether they like them or not.
Every major video game console on the market right now is sold at a loss (analysis of hardware for the systems show that Nintendo has the lowest loss margin even at their $100 price tag as a side note. Then PS2, then X-Box.) Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all sell these systems at a loss in order to get licensing fees out of game producing companies. They essentially do nothing, and get paid for it.
Microsoft lowering the price is pure economics. The cost of $200 is too much for some people. They realize if they drop it $50, they can sell more consoles. By selling more consoles, more games (theoretically) will get moved off the shelf and more licensing fees are paid to Microsoft.
Microsoft lowering the price has nothing to do with caring about people. Its about caring about profit. (How any good business is run.)
Didn't I read somewhere that it was going to $99 by Labor Day? Or was that just an ugly rumor, and this is the only price drop I can really expect?
Nope, I'm not nuts - this was the rumor.
Education is the silver bullet.
Actually it's no so clear this has to do with "price cuts" on the graphics chips per se.
ATI negotiated the deal in a radically different way from Nvidia -- they sold IP, not chips at a specific price.
The gamble in chip manufacturing is usually that you price the chips at a (near) loss at the start, and improvements in manufacturing result in cost reductions and profits later on in the process.
Nvidia used this model for the original X-box deal, but the design wasn't finalized and additional complexity was added, raising manufacturing costs (this is what triggered the arbitration between Nvidia and Microsoft over the last couple years.)
In any case, the X-box chips Nvidia sold weren't terribly profitable to them. I seriously doubt any chip manufacturer would accept a repeat of the arrangement. Obviously ATI didn't -- and had Nvidia negotiated a deal like ATI's on the original X-box the present situation would have probably been different -- the trade off being the potential profits would likely have been lower had the manufacturing cost reductions actually worked out.
While the parent of your comment is pretty much a troll, most consoles are not like that. How often must this be posted before this myth is finally laid to rest?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Yes, it's a PC. But by nowadays standards, it's a crappy PC. The stuff is rather old. A P3 CPU, a 20-60G harddrive, some three years old gfx card, no monitor included, moderate amounts of DIMM RAM. Might be good for embedded projects like laser displays for a DJ, info booth boxes and such, but there are better and cheaper home PCs available.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
'cause you're not a IQ=65 kid who with enough luck can be taught not to put the DVD disk upside down and any maintenance beyond pressing reset is beyond them. Game consoles are so dumbed down, that you just can't break them by doing something wrong from the UI. And stupidity costs. Simple.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Can you add more RAM to it? How about hard-drives? Does it have a free PCI slot?
The memory is soldered onto the mainboard, so unless you are an electrical engineer who has insides with the Xbox team, I doubt you'll be able to add RAM to it, nor or a PCI slot.
The 3 most common ways to allow you to run unsigned code (such as Linux) is to either:
1) Follow the soldering instructions, which require you to solder (IIRC) 2 seperate spots on the bottom of the mainboard. I tried this with a friend, and he fried his mainboard. I would not suggest doing this unless you have some good experience with precise soldering of electronics.
2) Use the James Bond 007 exploit, which requires a specific saved game to be put onto a memory card, and then once you load that saved game from within James Bond, it will allow you to load unsigned code from the Xbox. The only problem, atleast when this exploit first came out, is that you have to redo the exploit everytime you want to reboot your OS (or everytime you want to load some new unsigned code).
3) Buy a modchip. There are plenty of companies out there that sell modchips that don't require any soldering (but the chips can be a pain in the ass to line up correctly at times). There are also the chips that require soldering, sometimes up to 10 or more seperate points.
Unless you have A) The money to burn, or B) The skills to solder, I would suggest buying a no-wire modchip such as the Matrix. I purchased a few of these from easybuy2000.com (no personal affiliation, just a happy customer) and have had no problems.
Heck, new hardware at $150 means skipping 5 new releases at $50 each and waiting until they're $20 each. I don't have to skip the games, just wait a little bit.
Some games don't ever get re-released, and by the time you get to them, they cost upwards of $70 for one copy on eBay. Look at Chrono Trigger for Super NES, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo for PlayStation, or Rez for PlayStation 2.
One question - I haven't played it, so I don't know - but - what do you like about Ninja Gaiden so much?
See, to me it looks like Rygar for PS2 (which is the same publisher.. and the same engine?), or Castlevania: Lament of Innocence for PS2.
Both published by Tecmo but that doesn't mean anything; they were developed by different development teams. Dev teams are almost little companies within companies; they usually have their own offices (often their own buildings), and they have their own stable of games. Ninja Gaiden was developed by Team Ninja, the team best-known recently for the Dead or Alive series (both fighting and now volleyball), but also for (wait for it) Ninja Gaiden, from which the team derived its name. This same team responsible for the new Xbox game also developed the classic NES version, and possibly the arcade, Lynx, and Game Gear versions, though they were all quite different.
Rygar was developed by a different team within Tecmo - I couldn't tell you who, but I know for a fact it was not Team Ninja, as they only work on Xbox right now and only with their little cast of Team Ninja characters (the characters in DOA and Ninja Gaiden do cross over to some extent - the little ninja core of DOA, comprised of Ryu, Kasumi and Ayane, are related and appear in both series). Team Ninja are pretty adamant about developing their own game engines as well, so Ninja Gaiden's was not borrowed from Rygar (two different platforms anyway).
Now, I haven't played the new Ninja Gaiden and I'm not disagreeing with you that in general it and Rygar may be similar games. But as in any action game, it comes down to the execution, so it may very well be that Ninja Gaiden is that much more of a precisely timed game, with better level and enemy design, better graphics, etc. But really, it is true that it's just an updated remake of a game that came out 15 years ago (as is Rygar; Castlevania is technically a sequel, but was derived from a similar action platformer).
Basically these are all games within the same genre, so it's natural they would be similar. I don't think it's the originality that draws people to games like this; nobody would argue that remakes of classic games about ninjas are at all original. But that doesn't mean they can't be fun.
Over here it's 129.00, which at today's rates is 234.58 United States Dollars.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Besides, figuring a $150 loss per sale, that's only a cold $1.5 million on 10,000 units. Now, if those same units never sell there'll be double the pain, because they won't recoup $150 per box and the actual number of people playing legal games on the things hasn't changed.
To get to the $500 million the EU slaped them with you'd have to buy up over 3 million units assuming $150 loss per sale. Microsoft had sold fewer than 14 million units worldwide at the end of 2003. Do we really want to hand them 20% of their total sales to inflict losses similar to those done by the EU?
If not now, when?
Again, false. The only thing Microsoft is leveraging, if it is proven that they are selling below cost, is their money. Now, if they had bundled an X-Box with every purchase of Microsoft Windows, that would be illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly.
It's a bit counterintuitive, I know, but not every "unfair" business practice is illegal and actionable. Big companies have more money, and that's inherently unfair.
I picked up an XBox around Christmas, ordered my mod chip (Xecuter 2.3b), bought a 120 GB WD HD and proceeded to get busy. A couple of hours later, the Xbox was ready and I began to copy over my media. By the end of the night, I had everything stored safely on the box with a simplistic enough setup (EvoX & XBMC) so that my wife (a bright technophobe) was, suprisingly, very comfortable with. Add another $30 for a remote and it's a kick ass media system, that also houses my NES, SNES, Genesis, Mame and Apple ][ library (I am so lame). Oh yeah, it also pulls my favorite shoutcast streams so that I can listen to GrooveSalad or SecretAgent while getting pleasantly trampled in the backyard on those perfect spring saturday evenings.
You can also get yer Xbox working happily with a samba share. I was personally thrilled just get all of that shit off of my studio box so that I can get back to recording music... not cluttering it up with 40 GB of music and DIVX movies.
Yes, you could also do all of this with a custom built PC, but then again... a custom built PC isn't going to play the odd Xbox game that catches yer fancy.
So, if a total of around $300 and a small amount of dirty work is worth it to you to put together a very competent Media (Mp3/Ogg/AAC,etc... DIVX, SVCD, DVD, shoutcast stream), emulation machine that also plays xbox games... yes, it's worth it.
A couple of years back, I spent $250 on a DVD player that was fitted with NUON crap, what an effin mistake that was. Now that DVD player is a spare MP3 player for the bedroom.
____
#SickNotWeak
The only 'modding' you have to do is via software, and no it does not limit your ability to play games. You can do a hardware mod, but it isn't necessary. Get all the details here.
To illustrate the point -- I have a fully functioning Linux install right now with a 2 gig root partition. If I decide I want to play an Xbox game (e.g. Splinter Cell), I restart the Xbox, put the game in the drive, and am on my way. When I want to boot back into Linux, I restart the Xbox with no game in the drive, select "Linux" from the Dashboard menu, and it boots into Xebian (Xbox version of Debian)