Retail Ads Hint At $50 360 Price Cut

Following closely on the heels of Sony's $100 cut in price for the PlayStation 3, retail ads seem to indicate an upcoming $50 price drop for the Xbox 360. Gamespot investigates the rumour: "It's clear that a number of retailers are expecting an Xbox 360 price cut next week, so much so that they're willing to buy print advertising for it. If that's the case, Microsoft almost certainly told them to expect a price cut, and when it would be fine to start promoting it. When Microsoft actually decides to announce it remains to be seen, although sources close to the software giant are grousing through back channels that the discounting's cover has already been blown." This comes right on time for the annual release of Madden, Bioshock, and Blue Dragon.

Re:The part the summary misses....

[I'll Provide The War]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17603 0 [neogaf.com]

The Core gets a $20 cut and the Elite is reduced by $30.

Re:65nm anyone?

[hudsonhawk]

You can be 100% positive about whether or not they will have it, seeing as they haven't made a single 360 with that process yet.

For when they do, you can view the manufacturing date of the console by flipping up the little cardboard flap on the side of the box.

Re:How about you fix the problems instead?

[grumbel]

### 35% failure rate is total bull.

That number comes right from Microsoft. They never said that number directly, but they did say that they are going to spend one billion to handle the defects, given that 10 million XBox360 are released into the wild, just do the math and you will see that the failure rate is between 25%-70%, the lowest end is when a repair cost as much as a brand new XBox360, $400, the high end assume that it cost them $140 to repair one, the price they charged for out-of-warranty repairs. The ~30% failure rate was also independently confirmed by a few retailers.

Re:How about you fix the problems instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the 10 billion is supposed to be the total cost of the warranty extension, so they're also counting the expected cost of replacements for 360s yet to be sold plus things like customer service and shipping. Anecdotal data about 30% failure rates could be attributable to things like bad batches or statistical fluctuations (i.e. if the real failure rate were 10% the chance of a store experiencing a 30% failure rate would be non-negligible).

I'm a Wii fanboy and I want to see the 360 and PS3 fail, but let's try to be reasonable about things. The failure rate on the 360 is clearly unacceptable, but I have a hard time imagining that it's in the 30s.