Can price cuts make the difference for Microsoft's console? Does Blu-Ray still count? See how the console prices stack up.
Microsoft's announced a small slew of price cuts to Xbox 360 peripherals, just a couple of weeks after they cut the price of its console offerings, grabbing the coveted "cheapest entry point" banner, and bumping up the default Pro hard drive to 60GB along the way.
Today's price cuts vary in quality, with the best cuts coming from the cheapest peripherals -- the media remote and Xbox 360 headset now cost $20 less at $29.95, On the other hand, the 120GB Xbox 360 hard drive has dropped $30 to $199, which sounds like good value, until you realise that $199 could buy you around 1TB of hard drive space without too much trying in the PC world.
Likewise, the overpriced wireless adaptor drops $20 to $149.95, although we've constantly seen street prices for that peripheral even lower than that already.
Microsoft currently has the low price ground with the arcade model, although a hard-drive-less 360 is a less than optimal configuration, even up against the $399 Nintendo Wii, which uses SD cards for storage.
Sony still has the high-price ground, as its current single official SKU, the 80GB PS3, sells for an RRP of $699, although the fact that you can drop any 2.5" SATA drive into it, and it comes with a Blu-Ray drive does soften the price blow somewhat -- and explain why Sony only typically offers one console bundle at a time.
Leaving aside the vexatious issue of "which system has the best games" (always subjective), here's how the console war currently stacks up:
| System | RRP | Storage | Additional Storage/Cost | | Xbox 360 Arcade | $349 | None | 120GB/$199 | | Xbox 360 Pro | $499 | 60GB | 120GB/$199 | | Xbox 360 Elite | $649 | 120GB | N/A | | Sony Playstation 3 | $699 | 80GB | Varies; will take any standard 2.5" SATA drive. | | Nintendo Wii | $399 | 512MB | Varies; will take SD cards up to 2GB | |
Those on an extremely constrained budget may want to look to the far east, where Microsoft has just announced price cuts to the arcade Xbox 360 bundle which will see the console on sale for a measly 19,800 yen -- about $215 at current exchange rates.