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Xbox 360 60GB discontinued, Elite price drop?

Now that Sony has finally unveiled the PS3 Slim at this week’s GamesCom, what will Microsoft’s response be? Well, it appears that they’re doing a little of their own stock shifting as photos sent to Kotaku from Gamestop employees show Arcade 360 boxes only advertising the Elite and the Arcade models on the back, with the Pro conspicuously absent. Since then a snapshot of the Meijer catalogue, a retail superstore, shows a picture of an Elite retailing for $299, a dramatic drop of $100. According to Kotaku, this new price is meant to hit ‘"catalog stands" on August 30th. But further digging by Joystiq revealed a slightly different story: "we called nearly a dozen Meijer’s locations to try and confirm the cut -- only one Media Center employee had heard about it, and explained that it would be a ’week-long sale’, and not a permanent price drop."

Despite this employee’s explanation, I find it difficult to believe a temporary sale of $100 is possible whilst reports of the Pro’s demise are in the wild. The case for the Pro’s exit grows larger if coupled with a story reported last week by MCV about Argos showing the 60GB Pro model as ‘discontinued’ on their website. Although they’ve since come out and said that this was an honest mistake, Eurogamer reported that they’d received confirmation of the Pro’s demise from "a member of a small chain of British retail stores". They went on to say that "furthermore, the source claims Microsoft will increase the price of the Xbox 360 Arcade bundle and remove the free Xbox Live Arcade games from within". This has since been confirmed by Eurogamer who has been told by online retailer ShopTo that, ‘Microsoft will increase the price of the Arcade Xbox 360 bundle to £159.99 (from £129.99) starting 1st September".

This looks to be a purely UK move as Eurogamer’s independent retail source cited the poor Pound to Euro exchange rate as the reason for this price hike. While this does lend weight to the continued speculation of the Pro being phased out and replaced by the Elite, the decision to raise the price of the Arcade quite so much strikes me as very odd. That is, of course, unless Microsoft has finally seen the light and will now fit the Arcade models with a hard drive, something that makes sense in a market gradually focusing on digital downloads.

Since the price of a new PS3 Slim will be $299, it seems highly likely that Microsoft will trim down their range of SKUs and continue with just the Arcade and Elite. Dropping the premium console down to $299 is something I feel Microsoft has to do in order to compete with Sony on price. In my mind it would make more sense to drop the Pro down to the Arcade’s price point and do away with the hard drive-less version of the Xbox360 completely. After all, the different versions of the Xbox are merely down to their hard drives and colours. There’s little need for a middle SKU anymore and it would help to ease confusion by reducing the count to two. Now that the Arcade is getting a price hike in the UK, maybe both systems will get a little redesign or a few juicy additions. PlanetXbox360 has already shown a few pictures of an "all new Xbox 360 Elite model". These photos are just the retail packaging but it’s not a huge step to think that a small iteration could be included as well.

TGR says: True