Network now...NEWS
No 360 Price Cut for “Many Years”
Microsoft’s UK head of gaming, Stephen McGill, has said that the 360 will not see a drop in price for “many years”.
McGill was asked by Videogamer if it was unlikely that there will be another price drop for the 360 in the near future, to which he replied "Yeah. I mean absolutely. We're a great price now. I'm not dropping the price for many, many years in the future I would suspect."
“I’m not going to speculate where [the price of the Xbox 360] might go in five or ten years’ time,” he added, “but we've obviously just reduced the price and that's because we can pass the cost reductions we have straight on to consumers."
Currently, the 360 Arcade is the cheapest TV-console on the UK market, retailing at a modest £129.99, whereas the high-end 360 Elite sells for £299.99.
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Ha. That's all I have to say. Ha.
They've dropped the price three times in just about three years, and have thrown out a multitude of SKU's with varying levels of crap in them.
As long as the Wii continues its dominance, or if Sony goes whole-hog and lowers its price, Microsoft will be forced to drop the price again.
It's ridiculous to say that the market will suddenly become static. Reps for Microsoft should stop shooting off their mouths.
NickgamertagO1
Do you comment on everything? Not bashing, just curious...
Haha, no. Not nearly everything. It comes in waves. Sometimes I comment a lot, sometimes i don't. But sometimes I feel obligated to squash some random comments people make that have nothing to back up their claims other than their opinion. So I provide a counter argument including links to sources (when applicable) backing up my version of reality. I'll tone it down just for you Cally. ^^
LOL...its cool...keep up the comments, its refreshing and funny all at the same time...
Ofcourse they're not going to drop the price, the more they drop the price the more they sell but by dropping the price you're decreasing your profits, especially if you decrease the price as much as Microsoft has, they basically need to see two consoles now to get the same profit they made selling one before the price cut.
And what is "many years"? The next xbox I'm sure will be out within 3 years. It could be out in 2 years (Holiday of 2010). Many years to me is more than 2 years. They are saying that basically the 360 won't drop in price until well after the next xbox comes out??? But he did say "I suspect". So ultimately it doesn't sound like its up to him. There's no way there won't be another drop especially once the next box comes out. So to say "many" years is a little silly.
I'm pretty sure Final Fantasy XI needs a hard drive. So does the XBLA version of portal, it's 698Mb.
Correct. The .09% of 360 owners that have FFXI can only play it with an HDD. And there are a few XBLA games that MS made exceptions for allowing them to exceed the memory limit. I think there are about 2-3 that are around the 150-250mb limit, and Portal. Other than that, the games are at 50mb or less. So out of the 300 or so games (I'm guessing) the 360 offers, 7 of them technically require the HDD (after the NXE update any way). But XBLA takes up only a small percentage of 360 games that are sold. There is only 2 retail games that require the HDD, FFXI and the newest Burnout game requires it (only for online play though).
"Many years" seems a very daft thing to say, i suspect two at the outside, and that depends on how well these current price cuts are received, not to mention what's happening with the PS3.
As for the arguments that you need a hard drive, wi-fi etc and should factor in these when considering the cost of a 360, that also is plain daft. For £130 you get a console that can play (correct me if i'm wrong) 100% of the current 360 games catalogue. Yes, you'll need a hard drive if you want to download movies and take advantage of everything your 360 has to offer, but if you just want to play games then you have everything you need.
For many people, particularly in this economic climate, price is a big factor, so having the cheapest console and the ability to upgrade it with a hard drive later if you so wish has to be a very good thing.
nolim said
As for the arguments that you need a hard drive, wi-fi etc and should factor in these when considering the cost of a 360, that also is plain daft. For £130 you get a console that can play (correct me if i'm wrong) 100% of the current 360 games catalogue.
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What you state above is nonsense, the new update (NXE) Microsoft is bring this November takes up 128MB of memory available on the memory card supplied with the Arcade SKU. Therefore, the SKU is made redundant almost instantly when taking into account that you have very little memory left for saved games, music, videos, etc.
Microsoft even states on their own site that a HDD is recommended (See link below, second question).
In essence, the 360 is riddled with hidden costs that effectively will hammer the consumer who doesn't know any better.
http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/live/NXE/faq.htm
But his point was "you get a console that can play 100% of the current 360 games catalogue." He wasn't talking about music, videos, etc...only playing games.
Ozzman_79 said:
But his point was "you get a console that can play 100% of the current 360 games catalogue." He wasn't talking about music, videos, etc...only playing games.
Play 100% of the current 360 games catalogue? Not on the Arcade Sku because there would be little or no memory left on the memory card supplied to save any game in the first place.
And that's MY point.
Jimmy,
128mb is more than enough space for saving 360 games. That could be hundreds of saves worth of memory. Most people play no more than what, 7 games at a time? And most games are less than 1mb per save file per profile. But for simplicity, we'll say every game save is 1mb. And the average person plays 7 games at a time (not that high) that's 18 saves PER GAME. More than enough save space. Yes, some games take more than 1mb per save, but most take much less, around 100kb or so. So, the average person will be able to have more than 18 saves per game. You have no argument bro as far as 128mb not being enough.
Wow. Didn't know 360 saved games were that big. That sucks.
No, the saves aren't that big at all. There are a few games though (Bioshock) that the saves are kind of big, but if you only have 2-3 saves you'd be fine. If you override obviously that takes up no extra space, but if you like to create a ton of saves (I'm talking about bioshock here) yeah, that could get costly in the memory department. But no, 128mb for saves only for the 360 is more than sufficient. Most games are less than 1mb for saving.
Then it would seem to me that an HDD, though handy, would not affect my ability to play 99% of XBOX 360 games effectively.
Correct. The HDD really is more for marketplace content. HD movies are for rent only, but TV shows, National Geographic specials (some are an hour or more), and any video that isn't a movie are for purchase (keeps) but the HD versions take up quite a bit of space. I have over 30 gigs of video, most are UFC fights that usually are 1 gig or more each, but I do have some documentaries, music videos, comedy central stuff, etc. XBLA games once purchased can be redownloaded as many times as you want so if you want to clear some space you can knowing that you can re-download that game for free. And typically the 360 downloads fast. There are times live is slow, but most of the time I get 1mb actual download speeds (or faster).
Of course, once NXE hits, then game installs will obviously be pretty useful and the need for the HDD will increase exponentially if at the very least to save your xbox's disc drive, quiet it down, and keep it a bit cooler.
I've got 42 XBLA games, plus quite a bit of add-on DLC. Storing all of that on memory cards would be A) time-consuming, B) expensive, and C) confusing. Ask anyone who had a pile of PlayStation or Dreamcast memory cards where their saves for a particular game were, and they probably wouldn't know without checking all of them (Type-A's always know where all of their stuff is, obviously...)
Oblivion and Fallout 3 saves are around 2MB each. Playing several characters in either of those will fill up a memory card fairly quickly, especially if you only have a 64MB or 128MB card.
The lack of HDD caching is the worst feature of the memory card "solution", and developers have been complaining since the start about being hamstrung by the lack of an HDD where it used to be standard on the Xbox 1. Personally, I found it funny when people started complaining about mandatory installs on the PS3. I'd much rather do a pre-install and have a better/faster gameplay experience than listen to the jet engine in my 360 spinning up & down every time a game needs content. HDD installs also reduce pop-up and pop-in.
As for wireless, I live in an 82-year old house. Wiring a network is not an option, so Wifi is a requirement for me. My PS3, Wii, and DS all have built-in Wifi, but Microsoft wants $100 for a $14 USB adapter? I setup a bridged DD-WRT router instead, and even if I'd had to buy a new one, could have done so for ~$40.
Absolutely correct. If you have an arcade unit, you have the ability to play over 99% of the games. But if you're an avid XBLA user, having to delete games when you want to buy other ones would be tedious. You wouldn't need multiple memory cards, you would just have to delete games when you want to play other ones. As you probably know you can redownload anything you buy for free, so when you're done with the game, you can delete it and move on. If you ever want to go back to that game, just redownload it as it'll be free. Is that the most convenient way for a 360 owner to play his/her games? No. But you CAN, is my and a few other people's point. Of course its best to have an HDD, I don't think any one would argue that.
I wasn't sure about Oblivion and Fallout's memory requirements. I know a lot of games are in the KB and not MB, but apparently those two games have large memory requirements as well.
Yeah, the caching thing I go back and forth on. On the xbox 1 every console had an HDD so developers know they had that as an option for every xbox owner. The only thing was, hardly any games actually used caching at all. The Halo games did. But the percentage of games (I don't have proof of this, but I read about it about, I don't know, 3 years ago) that cached was pretty small. Developers didn't take advantage of it. As far as the 360? Yeah, I'm pissed they didn't include it in every system as I think its a jacked up way to increase revenue and developers aren't allowed to require it, so no caching for us HDD owners. Some developers include caching when the HDD is recognized, but I'm sure its hardly optimized. It is funny you mention the PS3 mandatory installs cause I would not have minded that as well. The only strange thing is the PS3 doesn't offer the option to install any game you want and some of the installs are only partial. I'll sit for ten minutes waiting for a quieter system and better load times.
Are you sure about the pop-in problem? And are you talking texture pop-in, or when the entire object pops-in? Or both? The object pop in from my understanding has to do with hardware limitations in that it can only render so many things at once. And the texture pop in has to do with not having enough ram. Correct me if I'm wrong, but HDD caching is just a faster way of getting the information to the RAM than disc drives? The transfer rate is faster, but you still only have 512mb of RAM available at any given time. Would HDD transfer rates help out with texture pop-in?
Are there any programmers out there that can better explain the cache process in relation to pop-in/up?
You're right about the cost of Wifi. I can't argue that. There are 3rd party ones that are cheaper and some not officially supported by MS do work. I would have liked to have Wifi set up since I do have a wireless router, but I'm not educated enough in that area to get around the ins & outs of wifi. Bridged DD-WRT router? I have no clue what that means (the average consumer isn't going to know what that means either). So for me, it was just easier to buy a long cable and wall molding to cover it up. I had to buy an ethernet to USB adapter for my Wii cause I kept losing the connection to my router.
I think your original point was that as $199 does sound cheap but if you want the complete experience, you're going to have to pay more (a lot more in some cases). And if you're comparing apples to apples, then yes, the PS3 is an excellent bargain if you're looking for everything it offers (although the PS3 doesn't come with ethernet cables, a headset, or ANY HD cables, component or HDMI, the elite comes with all those things so that right there costs you around 75 bucks if you get a half way decent HDMI calbe with a $20 headset and $15 ethernet cable). If you're not, and you just want to play retail games and nothing else, $399 is rather steep when considering most games you're going to want to play would also be available on a system half its price. That's when the option to buy the other stuff is nice, cause you don't HAVE to have wifi and you don't HAVE to have an HDD if all you want to do is play games.
I'm not sure where you buy your cables, but the headset should be the most expensive of the three accessories you mentioned. Monoprice and Newegg both have HDMI cables for at little as $6 each, and Ethernet cables are even less expensive.
Consoles have to stream in textures and models due to the limited amount of RAM available. Content streamed from the HDD can be processed faster by the system, so you'll see less pop-in (textures) and pop-up (polys) than when streaming that same content from disc.
Fallout 3 running from the HDD has less of both, and runs the 360 quieter and cooler too. That enables me to turn the volume down so that I don't wake up the wife, kids or dog when I'm playing :)
I'm curious to know if copied games are stored as an ISO or as a file-for-file copy. The two games I've copied over (Fallout 3 and Tales of Vesperia) both show up as a 5.9GB item under Memory. I suspect an ISO image, as they could DRM-wrap it easier than a collection of files. And we all know how much Microsoft loves to add extranous layers of DRM...
I don't think most would have minded a diskless 360 if we were free to upgrade them ourselves rather than being gouged by Microsoft. Hell, I'd even consider buying a moderately-priced licensed HDD case to slap any drive of my choosing into; that way Microsoft would make a few bucks and I'd upgraded whenever & however I wanted to.
DD-WRT's wireless bridging wiki (http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Bridge) explains how to configure two routers such that both appear as switches on the same subnet. It's a bit much for non-technical people to setup, but the interface is mostly obvious and there's a wealth of documentation available for those who want to pursue it. I've got my Xbox 1, Xbox 360 and Dish DVR connected via a bridged router. My sons' DSes connect to the Internet through the virtual WPA segment running on my primary router.
It has been a while since I purchased an HDMI cable/ethernet cable/headset since my 360 came with one (although I did buy a seperate HDMI cable prior to getting an elite so I use that one instead of the one that came with my elite). Last time I purchased one, for a NICE HDMI cable at 12ft. they were over 50 bucks. I'm sure I can find a cheaper one, but when dealing with HD, I prefer to get nice cables.
Ok, so the faster transfer rates of HDDs are what helps with the quicker texture fills. I still think that some pop-up (not pop-in) may have to do with the graphics card only being able to render so much at a time.
That I don't know. I'm not a part of the NXE beta and not sure what ISO or file-for-file copies are.
Yeah, not being able to upgrade to whatever HDD I want sucks. From what my friend told me is that you CAN use an external HDD and it works just fine, but somehow I've never believed that.
I only have one router and its a combination wireless/wired. If I knew a secure way to set it up that I don't lose connections and don't have to enter passwords in ever I'd do it.
Any way, good info. Thanks!
What's a "this gen" machine without HDD? Everybody that owns a XBox ends up buying a HDD anyways.
Yeah. I mean absolutely. We're a great price now. I'm not dropping the price for many, many years in the future I would suspect
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Are we mean't to believe that? Seriously, the minute the PS3 drops price around Europe Microsoft will have no option but to do another price cut as sales of the PS3 will go through the roof.
The 360 is already being outsold across Europe by the PS3/Wii and that's even without their competitors cutting the price of hardware.
Anyway, even at £169.99 (60gb sku) the 360 is still far too expensive considering that A) the hardware is still unreliable B) the consumer needs to pay additional costs for online gaming and peripherals such as the Wi-Fi adaptor, hence, add an extra £100 (based on a 12 month xbl membership) on to all 3 sku's. i.e. it would make the Arcade unit £230, the Pro unit £269.99 and the Elite unit £329.99.
With the above being said, the 360 isn't really any cheaper that it was 12 month ago and it certainly isn't much cheaper than the PS3 when taking the additional costs of peripherals/online gaming into account.
Just because you keep shouting these lies doesn't make them true you know.
@ J. Morrison
That all is true, but only if you NEED wifi, and WANT an HDD. Neither are close to being a requirement. As far as live? Its subjective to say whether its worth the price or not so i won't say it is in general. But to me, its well worth it. I'm hardwired (long cable hidden by special molding at the bottom of my walls) so I have no need for Wifi. Others, perhaps do.
Good points though.
Wifi isn't needed but needing a HDD is slowly becoming a requirement. The needed space required for the NXE update requiring users to clean their memory card fridge. Other games requiring a HDD for online play, or for caching, etc. To really get the best experience you should have a harddrive and unfortunately, Microsoft wants to charge you for that.
Agreed. As you CAN own an arcade 360 and have access to the entire game catalog and access to the multiplatform games at the quality (or better) of the PS3 versions for $199. BUT, you miss out on some features the 360 offers as far as marketplace is concerned (movies, shows, XBLA, and DLC) and the new install options coming up soon. But a lot of people just game and don't care about the extra stuff, and probably don't even know what NXE is (other than the ads on the dashboard) or really care. But for people who are into their gaming, the arcade is hardly the ideal way to go. And for that, the pricing of the HDD is criminal and is a bit upsetting. At least they are offering a 60 gig with headset and 3 months of live for $99. That coupled with an arcade unit actually saves you some money considering you get 5 live arcade games and a memory card for free (when taking the $299 price tag of the premium into consideration).
I think it was a huge mistake for any 360 to come without an HDD. I think they shot themselves in the foot with that one. Developers can't stream/cache from the HDD (some games WILL cache if you have an HDD but it’s not as efficient as it could be since it still has to work without one) and MS won't allow any developer to require the HDD so some games may be handicapped for HDD owners so arcade owners can still play. I'm sure HDD-less owners are happy they don't have to buy one and still play every game (except FFXI) just like the HDD owners can, but who really has a 360 without a hard drive any way??? They're lucky to have the installed base lead over the PS3 or else you'd probably see a lot more PS3 exclusives than there are now.