What the UK Xbox One Price Cut Means for British Gamers
With one of its most deterring factors being its price, the Xbox One is now set to get a huge price cut in the UK, where its sales are struggling the most.
Microsoft are a stubborn old bunch. So stubborn are the ol’ PC producing company that they hiked up the price of their next-gen console, the Xbox One, over their nearest competitor, the Sony PS4, for the sake of the Kinect 2.0, a camera peripheral that boasts the benefits of being able to read a player’s heart-rate and accept voice commands, yet it also makes the console it comes with $100 more expensive than its aforementioned rival. The easy solution would be to drop the price (and possibly drop Kinect too) at the risk of it gobbling up their profit margins, but as Microsoft don’t seem to want to take the latter way out, a price drop is in order.
Announced recently, Microsoft say that in the UK, the console will drop to £400 (around $670), giving the Xbox One a formidable price point to really be contended with. The decision is said to come after the PS4 (the standalone console is priced at £349 in the UK) became the UK’s fastest selling console, while the Xbox One lags slightly behind in the region, meaning that Microsoft have possibly done this in a move to make the choice between the two far harder for British gamers. Some retailers are also said to be selling the bundle for just £370, a huge difference in what the bundle would usually go for outside of this promotion. But it’s not just the cheaper price point that Microsoft are counting on to shift UK Xbox One units as the company are also throwing in a copy of the highly anticipated shooter, Titanfall to sweeten the deal, and given that the game is one of the most hyped titles on the console, that bundle sounds very sweet indeed.
While stocks of the console with the game are only available until they run out, many are calling this a slap in the face to those who forked out £430 for the console with no games whatsoever just a few months before. Early adopters are rightfully angry at Microsoft’s business practices, but it’s not the first time that the company have done such a thing, as they also used a similar tactic to shift units of the original Xbox console all the way back in 2002, but they did provide a thank you package of sorts to early adopters when they did that. Moving forward, two outcomes could possibly happen; if Microsoft do pull this off and surpass or match the PS4’s UK sales figures, then they will have been successful, but they may risk further alienating a core user-base of Xbox One gamers who have thus far been disappointed by the PS4’s seeming graphical superiority (certain new multiplatform releases have been shown to best the Xbox One’s graphics). So as for what Microsoft do next, we’ll keep you posted once we know more.
Source: CVG
Read more on xboxfreedom, Titanfall Xbox One Bundle Incoming: Get The Console And Game For $500, Microsoft to Experiment With Cheaper Digital Titles
