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."

WTB Link

[D'Sphitz]

Hard to RTFA without a link to TFA...

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: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: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: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: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:As if 20GBs are easier to make

[pthor1231]

M$==Vendor lock in.

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.

As far as your comment on running something at a lower spec than it was manufactured, downbinning, is pretty much limited to cpus AFAIK. If the hard drive platter loses so much space that they have to remove gigs of space from the drive, the manufacturer is doing something severely wrong.

Re:Ya know..

[KDR_11k]

Well, the Wii has neither a harddrive nor a Blu-Ray drive...