Top Reasons Why the Xbox 360 August Price Cut Makes Sense
With all the sales flyers and rumors floating around the interweb more or less confirming a Xbox 360 price cut, we wanted to step back and rationalize the reasons why it would make sense...
- Madden NFL 08
- With all three consoles finally available come 'Maddenoliday', this makes perfect sense. Madden Football gamers are an entirely separate gamer 'clique' (but equally important). The vast majority of Madden 'ballers' had a PS2 last generation. These gamers likely waited this year to see how the PS3 and Xbox 360 compared prior to committing to a 'Madden' platform. The word on the sports message boards is that NCAA Football apparently runs smoother on Xbox 360 (compared to the PS3 version). This is due to the game running at 60 fps. Madden 08 has also been reported to run at 60 fps on the Xbox 360 as well. Microsoft is certainly in a good position to take advantage of this annual 'Maddenoliday' surge in game sales with a well timed price cut.
- Follow What Leader?
- During E3 2003, Sony apparently became aware of a pending Xbox price cut and beat Microsoft to the punch by announcing a Playstation 2 price cut to $179 (from $199) during the week prior to E3. As planned, Microsoft followed through with their announcement at E3 Wednesday that year. This year, Sony also announced (prior to Microsoft's press conference) that they would indeed be cutting the price of the PlayStation 3 by $100 (even though this is apparently a temporary 60GB inventory reduction). Perhaps Microsoft is tiring of these console war games and didn't want to appear to be 'following the leader' as in the previous generation.
- $399 for how long?
- On June 30th, 2007, the Xbox 360 Premium will have been $399 for 645 days. This is even longer than the time it took the PlayStation 2 to initially reduce its launch price. Certainly the Playstation 3 launch price influenced this quite a bit, but damn.... that is a long time at $399!
