XBox360 Price Lowered $50

The gaming console price war continues on, this time with Bill Gates tossing his hat into the ring.

Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360's price will be lowered by $50, making the manufacturer's suggested retail price for the most popular version land at $349.99. The price-lowering, which will begin on August 8, coincides with an August 14 release of EA Sports most successful video game franchise, "Madden NFL 08."

The price reduction affects all versions of the Xbox 360. The core system, for which users can customize as they want (it comes without the extra-large hard drive) will be priced at $279.99; the Elite version, featuring a120 gigabyte hard drive, headset and other features, will be sold for $449. The special edition version, now selling at $399, comes with a charge kit, 20gig hard drive, and special-colored controllers.

Although a lot of consumers would still argue that the price is high, Xbox executives are thrilled that they were able to sell a significant number of units for so long at this price. Mitch Koch, a corporate vice president, said in the press statement that it shows "consumers believe in the value of Xbox 360. "On the eve of the best holiday games lineup ever and the launch of 'Madden NFL 08,' there has never been a better time to jump into Xbox 360."

Last year the videogame industry was taken by surprise from the success by the Nintendo Wii, an Xbox rival. Selling at just $250 per unit and with significantly less horse power, the Wii outsold the Playstation 3 496,000 units to 197,000 units the month before Christmas last year; the Xbox 360 had narrowly beat the Wii with 511,000 units sold. This year the Wii is outselling Xbox 360 by a 3 to 2 margin. Nintendo's best-selling system this year, however, actually isn't the Wii, but is the hand-held Nintendo DS system.

Sony has taken a slide for the worse. Earlier this year, Sony dropped the price in the 60gigabyte version Playstation 3 by $100 to $500 per unit. At the same time they announced that the 60gig model will be discontinued by the fall, leaving only the $600, 80 gigabyte version for sale during Christmas. Sales so far have been disappointing for the PS3, seeing as how PS2 was the dominant game console for so long and still continues to sell well, and outdoing its bigger brother 2 to 1 so far this year. Sony's game division announced last month that they posted a $237 million loss because of the lack of PS3 success.

SOURCE:

www.xbox.com

URLS:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2007/0806-consoleprice.htm

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/10519.cfm (for comparison sales reports)