As a lurker and a fence sitting Xbox fan who sees this argument a lot on here and price as one of the main reason I'm not buying one, that right there is more spin than reality. The Kinectless model is in every way a far more gimped model than the Arcade version of the 360 ever was. The only thing missing in that was hard disk space, yet most people still opted to get the "Premium" 360 throughout the entire generation. Kinect makes a much bigger difference in terms of what it actually adds to the system, and so far I haven't seen any indication or sales reports showing people prefer the Kinectless version over the real deal. It had only a blip in sales increase since that SKU's introduction. From a value proposition, it's in fact worse, for those that consider buying Kinect separate at a later time.
So yeah, it did not and still does not have a real price drop. Unless MS plans on selling me Kinect for $50 later, I wouldn't touch the Kinectless SKU with a 10 foot pole. And with the exception of Ryse, which has clearly not turned out to be the Xbox One's Gears of War, it actually doesn't have a real next gen engine on it, imo(referring to exclusives here). They can pack in all the $60 cross port and up-ported games they want, but until they pack in something like Quantum Break, or drop the main SKU to $399, I'm not jumping in, and judging by these numbers, neither will the majority of the 360 user base. Kinect itself is currently an afterthought with the only reason for owning it right now are OS features and fitness apps/games. Those are ,imo, the biggest causes for sluggish sales. And everyone of those things are completely correctable.
Sony's clearly got the jump on this gen, and has quite a few games to demo what next gen is all about on PS4. I don't feel MS has made that argument yet and $499 is far from a friendly entry price point. On the other end, with this kind of monthly difference, I don't see this 20K-30k gap in sales(when 360 is still also holding a similar gap over the PS3) and under 200k per month numbers holding off the Xbox in the USA at the time it actually comes down to more mass market friendly price point. The fact is Sony's not converting the 40+ million 360 users either and they are already at what I would consider a more mass market friendly price. The majority of that 40+ user base are waiting unless you believe the market has contracted that much. I don't and my bet is MS still has the first dibs on them if they hurry up and get their shit together.
Just my two cents.
