Xbox 360 price cut coming July 13

The Xbox 360 Pro (aka Premium) will now cost $50 less.

(Credit: Microsoft)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about rumors that Microsoft was planning to chop the Xbox 360's price in July. Well, that price cut was all but confirmed today by Kotaku.

After posting leaked photos of upcoming Best Buy, Kmart, and other circulars, the gaming blog now has a GameStop employee's cell-phone snapshots of shelf art and an internal memo announcing that the Xbox 360 Pro (aka the Premium) would drop to $299.99 on Sunday, July 13. Not coincidentally, E3 kicks off the next day with--you guessed it--Microsoft's press conference.

As Sony's PlayStation 3 has come on strong in recent months, sales of the Xbox 360 have been flat, so a price drop seemed likely. The success of Metal Gear Solid 4 continues to give the PS3 a boost, but chances are Sony, too, will have to trim the price of its console before the holiday buying season.

All that said, the big question remains whether Microsoft will announce any new configurations of the Xbox 360. Rumor has it, the company is just using the price drop to clear out inventory of the 20GB Premium before it brings out a new 60GB version. (Of course, if you're willing to take a chance on a refurbished Premium, you can do significantly better than $300). There's no word on whether the Xbox 360 Elite or the Arcade (no hard drive) will also get $50 snips or whether a flagship model with a built-in Blu-ray drive is really in the works.

Personally, I'd like to see Microsoft get rid of the useless Arcade and reduce the number of Xbox 360 choices down to two to avoid confusing consumers. Anybody else want to guess what Microsoft has up its sleeve next week and what Sony's next move will be?

[Kwasiowusu]

This price cut is to little too late. A total of just $100 in price cuts after nearly 3 years on the market for the 360? The idiots who run the XBOX business should have cut the price of the 360 to reap the benefits of the great buzz generated by the GTA IV launch in April. Instead, they allowed the 360 to sell less than 200,000 units per month during the massive GTA IV launch, and waited for all the GTA IV buzz to die off, before bringing in a pice cut, at a time, when there is no big game to give the price cut any momentum. Expect the price cut to have a very small effect on 360 sales for a couple of months, then for the 360 to return to its normal less than 200,000 units sold per month. If you ask me, the clowns running the XBOX busines should have been sacked long ago, when they launched the XBOX 360 Elite, a good 18 months after the 360 was luanched, and still incredibly managed to include the rrod with the Elite. What further poof of crass incompetence does one need? Robbie Bach and his cohorts are world champions when it comes to shooting themselves in the foot. No one can challenege them in that department.

[Kwasiowusu]

As for what Microsoft has up its sleeves for E3, a lot of it's been pretty much leaked already. It's quite likely we'll have:

1. A Motion sensing controller a la "Wiimote", but more advanced than the "Wiimote", probably bundled with Banjo 3 or Ninja Blade.
2. 60 GB 360 to ultimately replace the 20 GB Pro.
3.. We'll probbaly see something about "Lips" whether its is a kareoke game to compete against "Singstar" or just some kind of music game hardware or both.
4. New dashborad for Live.
5. We should see good playable demos of Halo Wars, Gears 2, Alan Wake, Viva Pintata 2 etc , and see something more of Peter Jackson's Halo Chronicles,
6. We might hea somethin more about the 360 IPTV, which they have been promising forever, and have still not really delivered on.

[Hjetland1]

Very nice more by Microsoft. This will only add value to those looking to get a 360 a a nice price point with a standard HDD. Quite a few people still looking to upgrade to a 360 this generation. Considering Microsoft will announce a full year of profit for the division next week per Bach I think now is a good a time as ever to continue to push the hardware further while continuing to see a profit margin for the next year.

This holiday season will prove to be a huge season for the 360 and I would expect to see at least one more price drop before the holiday season really ramps. The amount of triple A games the 360 has for this fall is really unreal. I expect this price drop to have very nice more for the console leading into Madden sales next month and officially starting the blockbuster season.

[JCPayne]

Poor XBox... They took soo much time and money investing in adopting the failed technology of HD-DVD and now they have nothing to show for it..... Ohh well another Microsoft prediction bit the dust.

[johnbuker]

Resident Evil 5 with Wii type controls for the 360 would be awesome...as far as the price cut goes, I bought the Arcade version at full price and then a used 20GB HD for $20, so I pretty much got this deal already...as an existing owner, I'd like to see larger, cheaper HDs...no way am I throwing down $200 for a 120GB one.

[MaLvaDo39]

Stuff that channel Microsoft! Count it as sales and look somewhat respectable by misleading "sales".

Also, you're $6 million in the red with this disaster called Xbox.