Remember when Nintendo was saying that the Wii wasn’t really competing with the Xbox 360 and the PS3?
And then later on, when the higher-ups at Sony and Microsoft were saying how they didn’t view the Wii as competition either — it was targetting a separate audience or some other nonsense?
Well, it turns out that they were competing after all.
Microsoft and others already have their eyes on the Christmas sales season.
With statements from Peter Moore and other prominent brass at Microsoft, it seems increasingly likely that the Xbox 360 will be seeing a price drop before then in order to compete against the "non-competition." (read: Mario and his machine)
“We are well aware that the sweet spot of the market is really 199 bucks,” said David Hufford, a director of Xbox product management. (Note: Sony sold 75 million PlayStation 2s at $299 or below that price.)
Wii costs $250 and makes a “strong value proposition,” Hufford said. “When mom walks into the store and sees she can get a console with a game for $250, she sees it as a $300 value. They’ve done a good job.”
Turns out being cheap and accessible to everybody is the key to winning the console race, who would’ve thought?
I guess whoever designed the PS3 as an impenetrable, black monolith and then set the price that is basically equivilent to an average person’s mortgage payment — they should be taking some time out to rethink the whole videogame engineering thing.
[via Bloomberg News]
