Pachter: More console price cuts coming by summer

In his latest advisory note to investors, Wedbush Morgan prognosticator and analyst Michael Pachter goes on record with his belief that we'll see "another price cut for both systems some time this year (around summer)," noting in the email that "because its manufacturing costs are lower, Microsoft has the ability to lower price as early as March or April."

In lieu of a price cut on Microsoft's part so soon, Pachter feels that the company may instead introduce "a more feature-packed Xbox 360 in early 2010 (likely with a 250GB hard drive) at the same $299 price point." The great seer believes that Microsoft will only drop the price on its console before summer "if it begins to lose significant market share to Sony," adding that he anticipates last fall's price cut on PS3 will continue to help Sony gain ground on Microsoft.

On the portable front, Pachter doesn't expect PSP Go (remember that?) to make much headway this year unless Sony prices it "more reasonably," and says that the biggest challenge facing Nintendo DS is "its own high installed base," stating that he anticipates sales of the handheld to steadily decline in 2010. Good thing Nintendo's started talking about a "DS2," huh?

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/12/pa...ing-by-summer/

Adding more stuff (aka HD space) for the same price is probably going to be the better model for Sony and MS.

Or rather, MS can merely keep adding gigabytes to the Elite model, and eliminate the Arcade model in favor of a $100-150 "RROD-Replacer" model that's just the base unit with no cables, powerbrick, controler, or faceplate.

$300 is the "sweet spot", and will remain so until the replacement generation of consoles is nearly ready to ship.


As for Nintendo, a price cut to $150 isn't that bad of an idea. In lieu of that, they should start packing in goodies like a 2-gig SD card and/or a second Wii-Remote+Nunchuck set.
Luckily for Nintendo, DSi-XL is probably going to sell pretty well, if not far better than DSi-small is doing.

SONY will dominate the market from here on in, I was riding on Nintendo when the Wii was on top... But since owning a PS3, the odds are towards SONY, who in the end everyone purchases their consoles at some point. :cool:

Apparently the Wii only costs $85 to manufacture or $105 with everything in the box so i'm expecting a decent cut because of slowing sales, Sony needs a minimum 15% price cut and MS need to dump that wired controller, knock some money off the elite and stop being such tight arses about charging for all XBL features and give us at least something without paying for a package, it will at least give more people reason to get an unmodded 360 and possibly decide to pay.