Responding to complaints, Xbox group product manager Aaron Greenberg has said that the company does not want to mislead consumers with MS Points and will be looking to display actual currency prices next to the MS Points for all content.
“We never intended to mislead people,” Greenberg said, via G4. “We want to be transparent about it, and so it is something that we’re looking at.”
“How can we be more transparent and let people see it in actual dollars? You’ve got to think that we have one service that we’re offering around the world. The nice thing about Points is that no matter if you’re on the JPY or the EUR or the USD – something that’s 200 Points is 200 Points everywhere around the world. There’s more technical complexities to being able to put local prices in. You have to do that for every product in every country and you then have to deal with currency fluctuations. So there’s some challenges to that, but we absolutely did it with the Games On Demand, response has been good and absolutely it’s something we’re looking at doing,” he concluded.
Result for: group product
In an interview with Kotaku, Aaron Greenberg, group product manager for Xbox 360 has said that the company is confident it’s console will outsell the rival Sony PlayStation 3 for the holiday season, worldwide.
“We expect to continue our price advantage over the PlayStation 3 for a long time,” said Greenberg.
“And we feel confident that we’ll outsell the PS3 this holiday season in North America and in Europe. We’ll do it on a global scale.”
Greenberg cited the across the board price cut as well as a collection of new bundles as reasons for why the console will succeed.
“We’ve seen lifts across all consoles, but the Arcade is doing exceptionally well,” added Greenberg.
The 360 has outsold the PS3 in Japan for five weeks straight and recently outsold its rival in the US for the month of September.
Result for: group product
Officials from Microsoft have now confirmed that their Xbox 360 console line will be seeing a price cut, at least in Australia and New Zealand.
The Elite and Premium models will drop AU$80 to AU$579 and $AU649 respectively, while the Arcade will drop to AU$349, making it cheaper than the Nintendo Wii in the region.
Last week, KMart fliers showed that a $50 USD price cut was coming for the Premium model in the US, but Microsoft has still not confirmed the cut, or what the price drop would be for the Elite and Arcade models.
Data figures have shown that the 360 is currently being outsold by the Wii by a 4:1 margin and that the PlayStation 3 is also outselling the 360, although it is by a smaller margin. The PS3 sells for AU$699 in Australia and the Wii is priced at AU$399.
Jeremy Hinton, Australian Xbox group product marketing manager added, “We’ve got a track record showing that whenever possible we want to pass on savings to the consumer. We thought this was a great time to do that.”
When asked if Microsoft was disappointed by the 360’s performance so far in the region, Hilton said, “If you look at the dollars going through the till over the past 12 months you’ll see consumers are buying more Xbox 360 products than any other platform - the entire package of console, software and accessories. So we’re very pleased with how it’s tracking.”
Of course, Hilton neglected to add that the prices for the console in Australia are still much higher than it is in North America and even Europe especially considering that the Australian dollar is now almost equal to the US dollar.
