A picture's worth a thousand words - unless that picture is misleading! This photo has been passed around quite a bit with the tagline that the Xbox 360 prices were slashed in Japan because of slow sales. Indeed, if you look at the photo, it appears that the sticker price of the console has been cut from 38,800 yen (about $350) to 18,800 yen (about $150). Wow!
But...that's not entirely the full story. We contacted our correspondents in Japan to check out the deal, and they report that, according to a phone conversation with retailer Sofmap, the photo depicts a deal the retailer has been promoting with an internet services provider called @TCOM since launch day. The promotion, moreover, is offered only to the first twenty people per store who sign up - and they have to subscribe to the internet service to get the discount. I'm sure you've seen similar deals wrangled by companies like AOL.
Our correspondents note that there is a similar deal going on with Tepco which gives the customer a 10,000 yen discount on anything sold on the store upon signing up for Tepco's internet service.
Finally, our correspondents report, "We asked them specifically if this deal had anything to do with 360s being sold for cheap because everyone has tons of stock, and they said no, that's not the case at all."
Similar deals are also in place for other consoles like the PSP, so this is simply another example of Japan's hardware bundling practices. So, although the 360 isn't selling as quickly as it did in North America (about 28% of the units shipped have been sold so far, according to a Bloomberg report), the photo doesn't indicate that prices were slashed after launch day as some sort of desperate measure - it means that Japan has bundled offers that are just as annoying as the ones we have in North America. Will these bundles move console units? Hm.
Tokyo-based pals Hiroko Minamoto and John Ricciardi chased down the information contained in this report.