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Microsoft Readies Cheaper 360
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Jul 09, 2007 11:34 AM
from the i-think-they-had-this-ready dept.
from the i-think-they-had-this-ready dept.
Officially Microsoft is putting on a brave face, saying they won't drop the 360's price even in the console's weakest market: Japan. Just the same (probably in anticipation of Sony's PS3 price drop), the San Jose Mercury news says the company is secretly working on preparing a lower cost Xbox 360 SKU. Called 'Falcon', it's a cost-reduced system using 65nm chips instead of the at-launch 90nm electronics. This ties right into Michael Pachter's expectation of such a cut; it should be noted he doesn't see the DS or Wii prices moving any time soon. Related to all of this, Newsweek's LevelUp blog has two great interviews today: a Peter Moore discussion harkening back to last week's warranty announcement, and a chat with Jack Tretton about the price cut and the 360's hardware issues.
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Let the price wars begin (Score:2)
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So, I might be 'stupid' but I didn't get screwed.
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Paid corporate astroturfer alert! He said "anticipate" and "add value" in the same sentence, dead giveaway in speech pattern for "marketing drone".
Redesign might be nice (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't forget the DVD drive! (Score:3, Interesting)
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I think (Score:2, Insightful)
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As it stands right now, the format war is still a toss up.. no sense in packaging in something that could potentially kill you should you have happened to pick the wrong side.
Anyway, it is too late at this point.. adding either HD DVD or BR now is pointless since game developers cannot target it because its not a guaranteed feature (just like the hard
Sony is back to square 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Wii: 250 usd
360: 350 usd
PS3: 500 usd
And the killer feature for each console:
Wii: totally new way to control games
360: the best online gaming experience of all consoles
PS3: Blu-Ray
Notice: PS3's killer feature isn't gaming related one. One reason gamers aren't very excited about it...
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Re:Sony is back to square 1 (Score:5, Funny)
2484 comments man. Practice makes perfect! Thanks for your concern though.
Parent
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I didn't know PS3 and Wii have free games? Like, you go in the store and they give you disks for free or something? The fact is, if I want to play online I can pay a fee and play.
What should I do to get the same experience on PS3? I could pay as much as I won't but I won't get it. And you're out $150 more for the initial purchase on top of th
Re:Sony is back to square 1 (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
warning: long and ranty. (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people enjoy pointing out how "immature" or "childish" someone else is, or their choice of entertainment. Generally, in conversation, these people also point out how mature they are all the time -- it's insecurity, like those homophobic wankers who point out how "gay" this or that is all the time. Basic projection and insecurities.
To me, it's a true sign of creativity to make something enjoyable by dif
SKU (Score:5, Insightful)
For those of you who need it spelled out, run this at the command prompt: perl -wc split ('', $rant)
The correct term is 'model'.
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It's worth noting that different stores may assign different SKUs to different items, which isn't unambiguous. UPC would be a better unambiguous code. Make/Model is actually the most consumer friendly (360 Core, PS3 80GB, iPhone 8G).
Why isn't it used? Because some gaming industry insiders wanted to elevate themselves in a shroud of exclusivity and elitism and you can't do that by using acronyms and terms that are already used
Xbox division profitable when? (Score:2, Insightful)
The earliest reports [joystiq.com] pegged the Xbox as costing about five hundred through seven hundred dollars to manufacture, a loss of a few hundred dollars on each console sold.
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When they've earned their digital media monopoly.. (Score:2)
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To say the same thing in a more cynical way, if you play with the numbers enough, you can make whatever year you like profitable.
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It will be considered profitable when they're bringing in more money each quarter than they're spending. This is where I don't get it, but maybe that's because I grew up in a family business and no
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Most of those millions go to licensing, marketing, and occasionally name-brand voice talent.
Regardless, Microsoft doesn't rely on that stuff for their gaming division to be profitable. All they need to do is sell the 360 for the same or more than it costs to manufacture it, th
you get what you pay for (Score:2)
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The biggest issue with Xbox360 reliability was insufficient heat management, this process will reduce the amount of heat and power. So this is pretty much good news for everyone except anyone
XBox 360 4.0? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:XBox 360 4.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
You might "feel" like you got ripped off, but you really didn't. It's definitely possible to not worry about such things, and so that's what I'd advise, because worrying about it isn't going to accomplish anything positive anyways.
Parent
Wow great (Score:4, Insightful)
New features (Score:3, Interesting)
What other features could they build into it with the added room of smaller components? No one really thinks its too big, so changing the case probably isn't a good idea at this point, although it would be nice.
Re:Okay.... (Score:5, Insightful)
A price cut is not expected for the wii because it's still selling as fast as they can make it! Microsoft and Sony are having trouble moving stock at this point, so a price cut makes sense for them.
Parent
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Of course, this delay does a couple of smart things:
1. Maintain high demand so that price cuts aren't necessary.
2. Delays production of units so that component parts become cheaper -- thus reducing t
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I don't really think that they can "only" produce a handful of them
Well, according to vgchartz.com, Nintendo is currently selling between 217,000 and 225,000 each week. At 217,000 a week, they have to produce over 30,000 a day or over 1,200 an hour (assuming around-the-clock production) to meet that demand. That's quite a few consoles. In addition, they can't just add capacity because they need it for a few months to catch up with demand. Adding addional capacity takes a lot of time, and a lot of mo
Doesn't make sense. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, after a while the prices of parts comes down. But in the meantime you've lost sales and market share to the competition. And since your revenue is dependent on game sales, this is only shooting yourself in the foot.
Furthermore, you get bigger discounts on parts when you order them in larger lots. So anything you might save is lost by buying in smaller quantities.
Finally, there is some truth to the idea that a modest shortage can help spur customer demand, but within limits. Too much shortage and people turn to the competition.
Nintendo claims that their problem is that they've contracted out manufacture and can't ramp up production as easily as if they had their own production lines. I don't think this is the entire story. There's tons of contract manufacturing capability in the world, and the Wii uses standard, mature (and therefore cheap) technologies. This has been going on long enough that they could have brought other manufacturers online if that were the only factor.
I suspect that the inability to ramp up production is related to the Wii's low price. It is certainly not the case that they could not have brought more production capabilities on line by now, but it may be that they can't build more at the price they need to build them. They may have structured their deal with Foxconn (the OEM) in such a way that it is cheap but not scalable. For example, they may have agreed to limit the number of units to a degree that can be produced by certain slack resources at Foxconn, that are otherwise engaged in higher margin work.
I'm talking through my hat here, since I know zilch about manufacturing. But I'm reasonably certain the problem is that they can't scale their production at the price they want to sell these things for. If they could, then they would, maybe not enough to keep everybody's shelves stocked to overflowing, but enough so that you'd consider driving around to find one. My son wants one for his birthday coming up, and I told him that while I'd be happy to shell out the dough, there was no way I'd spend the time it would take to track one down. They're losing market share to the competition because of situations like this.
Parent
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Layne
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Economically speaking, the Wii should see a price increase of $50-100, which brings it in line with the eBay price (which is roughly the true market price), thus stopping the shortage. However, the effects on long term customer goodwill probably wouldn't be worth it.
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The only reason that I bought a second nunchuck so far is to play Wii Sports Boxing... I indeed have yet to see another game using/requiring multiple nunchucks.
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We have very short attention span and can't judge things in context (such as Wii's absolute price, Wii sales, PS3 position on the market, XBOX's position on the market, previous statements by people in each company etc.), so saying this is surely to impact Wii and DS in a negative way!
Boo, Wii is not also lowering their prices!
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Well, I do recall that the PS1 was specifically priced $100 less than the Sega Saturn, and that the price was announced specifically to screw Sega.
Wouldn't surprise me if they had to drop the price early to follow a desperate Sega drop...
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that must explain the sales numbers.
(yeah, this'll ding my karma, but it was totally worth it.)
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The dollar/fun ratio becomes horrible when you factor in the cost of buying some friends to play with...
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At this point i'd say the 36
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Companies drop prices to increase sales. Since launch, Wiis have been selling as fast as Nintendo can make them, with no signs of that letting up. Lowering the price would just mean less profit for Nintendo.
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All they are doing is going with a smaller manufacturing process and refining the hardware. What in gods name makes you think that they will defeat the whole purpose of the whole console paradigm.
1 performance standard for cheaper dev and less confusion for customers.