Xbox 360 20 GB Price Cut "While Supplies Last"

Erik J sends word that the rumored price cut on the 20-GB Xbox 360 is true, sort of. The Seattle PI's coverage says: "But the reduction isn't exactly what it might have appeared. In reality, it's more like a clearance sale, designed to empty the shelves for a new Xbox 360 with three times the digital storage, at the same price as before... As widely reported in advance, Microsoft is dropping the price of the 20-gigabyte Xbox 360 to $299.99. The unexpected twist: Sales of that model will end when current supplies run out."

Comments

WTB Link

[D'Sphitz]

Hard to RTFA without a link to TFA...

Re:WTB Link

[D'Sphitz]

Link: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/

Re:WTB Link

[neo8750]

Link to the article? You must be new here...

Re:WTB Link

[peipas]

This link will remain valid after it's no longer the latest post.

Core

[negRo_slim]

I have a first gen unit... That produces insane amounts of heat but no RROD, there is also abnormal wear on the top sides of discs inserted into it, and a crazy grinding sound phone reps keep telling me is due to expansion from the DVD drive heating up. Hah, I'll take my next big ticket gaming purchase straight to newegg.com and replace my aging Radeon x1800 xt video card. The right video card for the right person can easily be in use as long as a good console would. Aside from a fan there are no moving parts to break and if it's going to overheat at least I can check it's temperature. Something I thought should of been added to the 360 dashboard at launch.

Re:Core

[zippthorne]

Yeah, but console games sometimes suffer from what I like to call, "console vision." The game worlds are limited and confining, possibly due to shoehorning PC genres into a console control scheme.

Case in point: compare battlefield 1942 with battlefront. And compare either of them to Tribes or Tribes 2.

I know those are old examples, but they're representative ones. The "way of thinking" problems are not related to the display hardware: the original tribes ran decently on a P-II 300 mhz machine, yet had over 100 km^2 maps.

Re:Core

[wild_quinine]

I'll take my next big ticket gaming purchase straight to newegg.com and replace my aging Radeon x1800 xt video card.

Why? The x1800xt will play any game on the market.

If you want games with the latest pretties, whilst the PC is still the most capable machine in the gaming arena (by a country mile) there's been a real drop off in graphics-itensive development for the PC since that 'aging' card of yours was new.

I bought a hot-rod DX10 card a year and half ago, and frankly I've never used it for anything that my previous X1900XT wouldn't have dealt with at least adequately.

Maybe it's my fault for not caring enough about Crysis, but I'm putting it on CryTek's boring gameplay mechanic, since there wasn't a lot else on the landscape, and I still didn't care... Since most of the world's gaming dev time on graphically superior games now lies with the warring consoles, the smart investment is not on a PC super-rig. The PC is firmly in MMO territory, and bi-annual releases of interest, if you ask me.

Re:Core

[CronoCloud]

Deus Ex is also an example the other way. The original if you remember, was ported to the PS2, which made very few changes to gameplay. You could even play with keyboard and mouse if you wanted to.

So don't say "console vision" because it's quite possible to do a PC to console port that keeps the gameplay but makes a few tweaks to the control scheme. Say developer vision instead. It was wrong minded developers who didn't even try hard.

Re:Core

[renegadesx]

RE4 sucks on PC. The Gamecube RE4 was actually quite good, handled well.

Your issue seems to be you expect RE4 and Metroid Prime to be FPS games... news flash they aint. Metroid has never been a first person shooter, its just a Metroid game with a first person view. RE4 is a 3rd person action game.

Halo's claim to fame are 2 things 1) The rebounding health meter and 2) making it simple for non-hardcore gamers to pretend to be hardcore gamers. Goldeneye set the standard for console shooters, Halo raised the bar (simplicity).

Consoles and PC's give different experiences and you just judge that if a game doesn't give you the PC experience it therefore sucks... you should be modded flamebait.

Fail

Re:Core

[azuredrake]

Odds are the compromises were actually made on content design during the planning phase.

Look at Deus Ex vs. Deus Ex 2: Invisible War. Though DX1 came out years beforehand, it had much larger maps and many more hours of gameplay than DX2. The reason? The xBox couldn't support the DX1-style map sizes, and it was simultaneously developed for both.

Re:Core

[azuredrake]

The Mass Effect PC port added a whole ton of new features that the 360 version didn't have. In the 360 version, you could not command your squadmates directly, you could just tell them whom to attack. In the PC version, you could directly control your characters, completely changing the feel of the game.

Re:Core

[zippthorne]

Yeah, but back before Xbox came out, Halo's planned claim to faim was going to be a lot of evolutionary realism improvements that add up to a revolutanary change.

On the list were:

vehicles: not only playable vehicles, but ones with realistic suspensions.

General graphics improvements.

smooth envierment transitions (IIRC, you weren't supposed to *ever* see a "loading" screen, even going from outdoors to indoors) ..Vast playable world. IIRC, the entire ring was supposed to be playable. I don't remember if it was supposed to be mostly dynamically generated procedural content or not, but that seems likely given the area of the ring exceeds the area of an entire earth by a significant margin.

Some of those improvements made it into the final game, but the vastness was gone. As was the FPS-ness, and much of the graphical candy.

Ya know..

[d_jedi]

Ideally, MS should get out of this ridiculous business of charging insanely inflated prices for storage and just open it up to use 2.5" hdd's like Sony has (not that I'm a Sony fan - but in this case, they're clearly superior).

I don't see digital purchases of movies/games/etc. for the 360 really taking off when people are limited to 20GB..

Re:Ya know..

[Chaos Incarnate]

You wouldn't see any significant discount on the PS3 by removing the Blu-ray video functionality; you couldn't lose the Blu-ray drive because games are using the extra space, so you'd only lose the video decoding/output.

Re:Ya know..

[afidel]

When I can get a 500GB drive for $69 and the 'upgrade' to a 120GB external drive costs $180, you know they're making a killing on capacity.

Re:Ya know..

[renegadesx]

Hard drives have come down in the past few years massivly, yes quality ones too. Microsoft is just overcharging because they are the only supplier of 360 hard drives rather than making them more open like Sony do. I am sure if the actual drive makers (Segate, Maxtor, Western Digital) were able to, they would be releasing 500Gb Drives for $75. This is a case of corporate greed an nothing more.

Oh and if Microsoft seriously did rigorous quality testing and cared about up front quality we wouldn't have had the RRoD plauging every 360 owner I know.

Re:Ya know..

[ShadowsHawk]

Do you realize you're supporting SONY for being OPEN at this point?

Sony is more open on this ONE point. They allow you to use third party drives and MicroSoft does not.

The XBox has some issues but, really, they make some damned fine hardware when they want to.

Hmmm... I guess they just didn't want to when it came to the 360. However, I'll agree that their peripherals generally work well.

Re:Ya know..

[ivan256]

One?

Real USB. Standard DLNA servers. Multiple memory card formats. Third-party codecs. A button to install third-party operating systems (including linux) in the default UI...

Sure... One...

Why is the twist unexpected?

[the_humeister]

Clearly they want to get rid of these machines and make room for the ones with more storage. How is that unexpected?

Link to more info

[MetalliQaZ]

As posted on Engadget, they are clearing out the 20GB model to be replaced by a 60GB model.

As if 20GBs are easier to make

[atari2600]

They (aka MS) clearly didn't learn from their 8GB fiasco with the original Xbox. Some of the latter Xbox models had 20GB formatted to show 8GB space (lolcatz). I am all about giving choice to the consumer but 20GB, no HDD models of the Xbox 360 are ridiculous. It's easier to get a steady supply of bigger HDDs than it is to get 20GB drives.

This is where Sony shines with the smallest disk drive on their machines being 40GB aside from the user having the ability to upgrade the 2.5" drives fairly easily. (I have both the 360 Elite and the PS3).

Re:As if 20GBs are easier to make

[icegreentea]

Downloadable content. Patches, extra maps, gameplay types, movies, games from arcade, music. Really, whatever you can pull off Xbox Live.

Re:As if 20GBs are easier to make

[FinchWorld]

Hmmm, you do realise that no cpu/ram/HDD/generally any electronic device are rarely made to specifically be a substandard device?

For example AMD undoubtidly make all there CPUs with the intention of them being the top of the line CPU technology currently allows for, however alot are unstable, but run stable at a lower speed. So when they put an 8GB drive in the original xbox, it was likely a much higher value that failed to meet the grade and was sold off cheaply, as a year or two, passed HDD manufacturing techniques would have been improved, so were a "Failed" cheap HDD might have once ended up at 8GB, it was now 10, or 20 GB. M$ simply partitioned them smaller as to 8GB to simplify the process of installing them, no point rebuilding software/firmware to handle a higher capacity when there isn't any real benefit (To those who ran them unmodded of course:)).

The current 20GB hard drives were likely the cheap failed end of sata drives when they first started mass production of the 360, likely now no HDD makers go that small (cheaply) so the new line of "failed" HDDs are 80GB or whatever they are going to bundle. As for not letting you use your own, well M$ want you to buy there stuff, and only theres, why else should someone else get payed, its the same with memory cards, controllers, etc. on the 360, unlike the various 3rd party stuff for the original. M$==Vendor lock in.

Re:As if 20GBs are easier to make

[donaldm]

Right, because no other company ever makes lock in. Nope, I'm just imagining memory sticks, atrac audio codec, minidiscs, UMDs and all that jazz.

The memory stick and the Minidisk is not just made by Sony it is licensed to other manufacturers as well. Many PC's have SD, Memory Stick and CF adaptors. ATRAC is a Sony proprietary codec and if you care to look there are many other proprietary codecs that have patents on them including some by Microsoft. Basically all vendors try to lock the consumer to their product and Microsoft is IMHO one of the worst for doing this.

As for UMD that is a proprietary Sony format however it is mainly used for the PSP since people could not see the point of buying movies on this disk. UMD has done surprisingly well since it is relatively cheap to produce and stores approx 1.8GB which is fine for the PSP. Of course you could put a game on a memory card (now) but this would still add significantly to the cost to the game.

Bah let me know when the XBox 360 breaks $200-

[Orion Blastar]

It isn't even worth the $299, because I can easily get a much more powerful PC with better graphics and audio and more RAM and a much bigger hard drive for the same amount of memory with a faster CPU to boot.

What I don't like is that new games like Civilization Revolutions are being released for game consoles only and not the PC anymore. Way to go 2K, tick off all of the loyal PC users who bought Civ 4, Civ 4: Warlords, and Civ 4: Beyond the Sword, only to be shut out of the new Civilization game in favor of the XBox 360, Nintendo DS, and Playstation 3. Civilization is better played on a keyboard and mouse not a game pad. It is a thinking game of strategy and tactics, not some "shoot 'em up" high action game console video game.

So now if I want to play Civilization Revolution, the next in the Civilization series, I have to buy a more expensive game console, and when Civilization 5 comes out, no doubt I'll also be forced to buy a brand new PC with better graphics, more RAM, and a faster CPU just to be able to run it.

Thanks for the buggy bloated video games, that are basically the same game with more features added to it as the old game that played on the older systems, only now at a higher price on a new game console that also costs at least $299 to play it on for a $60 game.

It really makes me want to use Freeciv instead, even if it is only 2D graphics and doesn't have all the bells and whistles and fancy animation of the commercial version.