Yesterday, it was made official: Microsoft slashed the prices of multiple Xbox SKUs. And the fact that the most basic of them, the Arcade unit, is now cheaper than Nintendo’s Wii has not gone unnoticed.
And Microsoft’s Director of Product Marketing, Aaron Greenberg, is quite happy that they’ve landed in that position.
“Our position here is that we’re complimentary to the Wii,” he said in an interview this afternoon. “Our strategy all along has been to secure the core in our first couple of years, and I think we’re done a great job doing that. We’ve always planned to broaden the reach to the masses, and we knew that having the games library, having the price point to do that is very important.”
Greenberg isn’t just keeping his eye on the Wii. He’s also after the 100 million people who purchased a PlayStation 2, many of whom have yet to be converted.
“Tens of millions of those guys haven’t upgraded yet,” said Greenberg. “A lot of those guys didn’t pay more than $200 bucks for their system and now we’re speaking to those guys, as well. I think if you talk about the PS2 owners we have a couple things to our advantage. One is that we have all the great games they bought the PS2 for, right? We have ‘Madden,’ if they’re RPG fans we have that, we have ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and even exclusive content that’s coming, we have great racing games — we have games from all the genres and sports games are selling best on our system.” — MTV Multiplayer
He goes on to seemingly target the owners of the PlayStation 2, specifically those who haven’t upgraded yet.
Have any of you reading this not upgraded yet? Or perhaps own just a Wii? Is the price drop appealing to you? Tell us in the comments below.
