I think this is the right forum. Barely.
Anyway, a little while back, I decided I’d like to buy an XBox console—under the reasoning that, with the XBox 360 and the PS3 coming out, the price of the previous generation of consoles will start to come down as they slouch towards unfashionable obsolecence. (I’m planning on waiting until they cost about $50.)
My question is; can anyone give me any estimates as to when that will happen? Six months? A year? Five years?
I’d say it will be comparable to the previous generation price drop of Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64. Hard to get them new anymore in their original forms but I believe they both go for about $50 used at most used gaming places.
I think N64/PS1 came out around 1995 and the Gamecube/Xbox/PS2 came out in 2001? I don’t remember how long after that the prices fell.
Well, the PS2 and XBox can play DVD’s, so it’s tough to imgaine how they’d ever be cheaper than DVD players of the same quality. Previous consoles didn’t have that function.
I see that Gamestop currently sells refurbished (used) Xboxes for $120.
You probably won’t get much trade-in value as many people will start to dump their original XBOXs as the 360 game library grows over time and people begin trading up, but…
…enjoy it. Its not obsolete until you run out of games that you want to play. The eye-popping visuals on the next gen consoles are great, but there is a huge library of current games for your XBOX that you’ll probably love.
I have a PS2 (no XBOX) but do not intend on trading-in for a new system until I get to the games that are already out there that I think I’ll like. There are so many titles released these days that its hard to keep up.
The XBox requires a relatively expensive additional remote for DVD capability, and even then it’s a mediocre DVD player, and even then you can get a DVD player for forty bucks.
The xbox has the added appeal to hacker types to be a home media center (playing movies and MP3’s and showing digital photos from your networked PCs) with a few slight modifications. Much cheaper than a dedicated PC with a TV out card, even at $120.
I doubt the prices will drop below $100 for the next year or so.
You need a remote and an attachment to the control port, but IIRC, they only cost about $25 total. I’m sure it’ll be much less than that used.
They may just be discontinued rather than discounted. Microsoft is reported to take a substantial loss on each xbox sold. It would make financial sense for them to stop selling the xbox as soon as possible, say when they catch up with the backorders on the xbox 360.
Even if they are losing money per unit, if their fixed costs are high enough, they might still be better off continuing to produce XBoxes for a while and targeting the crowd that’s not going to shell out $500 for a gaming system.
Also, Microsoft gets a cut of game sales, so if XBox games keep selling well, it may make more sense to keep selling XBoxes in the long term, even if they’re taking a hit on each unit. Maybe they’ll borrow a play from Sony’s book and release a miniaturized (and cheaper-to-build) XBox.
Just out of curiosity, what happens to these units when hooked to an HDTV? For that matter, are there any HDTVs available or anticipated that do away with analog inputs completely?
IIRC, Microsoft can’t just build a mini-xbox - MS would need to get the licensing rights from Intel and Nvidia for the CPU and GPU; these companies are not likely to be all that cooperative, given that MS went with IBM and Ati for the 360 (MS did get much more expansive rights to the CPU&GPU designs this time around though, so a mini-xbox 360 may show up in a couple years.)
Sony owns all the IP in the PS1&2, so they could build die shrinks - heck, the PS2 uses what is basically a PS1 on a chip to handle I/O, and made backwards compatiblity very easy to do for the PS2.
Bryan Ekers, the Xbox 360 comes with componet HD AV cables, and can run games at 720p or 1080i.
There are seperate component cables you have to purchase to make the Xbox display in HD, but they do work. If you use the cables that come with the system you get the same display on an HDTV that you would on a non-HDTV.
To better qualify that last post: I’m referring to the original Xbox, not the 360 which comes with the HD cables already.