Hey, remember that “temporary” price cut from $400 to $350 the Xbox One saw in November and December? How it was gone January 3rd? Yeah, hope you didn’t buy it at $400 last week, because today, it goes back to $350. But this price is just a “promotion.” Sooner or later they’ll be putting it back at $400! Honest!
The holiday price cut was a smart move on Microsoft’s part. November and December were the only months last year the Xbox One beat out the PS4 in sales, and that was a turnaround which was desperately needed since the PS4 was outselling it by a three-to-one ratio. Just as importantly, it sold more software, although that’s a declining market.
That this “promotion” is returning after just two weeks is fairly telling. After the holidays is just as important as before, as gift cards are redeemed and holiday cash spent. Either they didn’t like the numbers coming in, or they just preferred the numbers from the last month. It is worth noting that, even with the supposedly “dismal” sales numbers, the Xbox One easily crossed ten million consoles sold within a year of release, a key benchmark that to this point took consoles two to three years to cross. It’s also selling roughly six times as quickly as the Xbox 360.
This price cut, however, puts the ball in Sony’s court. They’ve already made the PS4 more enticing at $400; now all 500GB bundles come with The Last Of Us, one of the greatest games of the last console generation. That would also tend to be an indication that the price of just the console is about to drop.
But we’ll see. These consoles have moved so quickly it’s been rewriting the rules of how video games are sold. Either way, however, it means we’ll be seeing both around for a long, long time.