Wedbush Securities analysis Micheal Pachter claims that Microsoft and Sony are unlikely to announce drops in price for their two newest systems at E3. Speaking in terms of an investor, he said he believes there will be more bundles instead of price drops. “We do not expect price cuts for the Xbox One or PlayStation 4” he said, before saying that Sony will use a similar strategy with bundling it’s games. He also claimed that “we do not expect Microsoft to permanently cut the price of the Xbox One without Kinect from $399, instead focusing on compelling bundles with first- and third-party content, with some of the applicable games included as free pack-ins.” which Microsoft has completely proved him wrong at and has changed the price completely.
He said however, it is longer overdue to see $50 drops for the last gen consoles, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Both Sony and Microsoft are holding E3 press conferences on June 15th, so we will get more information then.
However, after all this speculation was made Microsoft announced that the 500 GB Xbox One price has officially been dropped to permanently $350. This price follows the price it had been discounted to for a promotion for quite some time now.
I’m curious as to how Sony will respond to this. They typically try to keep their consoles around equal price if not have one slightly less than the other, to make competition make more sense as well as many other reasons I’m sure. It is somewhat ironic that the specific hing Wedbush said wouldn’t happen, happened. I’d love a price cut for these next-gen systems, making them more affordable for everyone. For the amazing still last-gen systems, having an even smaller price will make it a lot more accessible, especially seeing as how the prices for the games for these systems are dropping. We will have to wait and see how everything plays out at E3.