Microsoft Price Drops Xbox 360, Hopes To Court Wii And PS2 Owners
Microsoft is the first company to have hardware cheaper than Nintendo. The company's director of product marketing, Aaron Greenberg, told me he's happy with that positioning. "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." The lingering PS2 owners almost more seemed important to Greenberg. For all the Wii's popularity, it hasn't yet reached the critical mass the PS2 hit over its still-continuing lifecycle. Greenberg believes that's chief to Microsoft’s future. "I think we have a very compelling story for them [PS2 owners]," he continued," and there's a lot of very price-sensitive guys [that are] clearly a much larger audience than the Wii audience today. They [Sony] sold over 100 million consoles so there's got to be at a good least 80 million PS2 owners that haven't upgraded yet. From an addressable market standpoint, that would be the single largest addressable market for us." This one might be a bit of a reach, but are you someone who's still held out on moving to the latest slate of consoles? Why haven't you switched? *** 
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In one form, the Xbox 360 is now cheaper than the Wii. Microsoft announced price reductions today for all three Xbox 360 models, and brought the Arcade box to $199.
