There must be a good few Xbox One buyers out there feeling a little peeved at the moment after purchasing their console early in January when the Redmond company had decided to bring the price back up from previous holiday season reductions. It didn’t last long however, and just a few days into January Microsoft has decided that this time the price is coming down, and staying down, at $349. The console was sold at a cheaper price over the holidays, even going for $300, so we are thinking Microsoft have found a happy medium at the present cost.

It took a while for Xbox One to catch up to PS4 in terms of sales. With the new price reduction it’s likely that we’ll see healthy sales figures throughout the year. Although the NPD Group – market research specialists for video games – hasn’t released December’s sales figure yet, reports suggest that Xbox came out the best-selling console in December last year, just as it did in November. That’s two months in a row, after living in the shadows of PS4 (priced at $399) for a long time.

And the trumps just keep coming. Microsoft also gloated recently about software sales, saying that throughout November and December Xbox One games had sold more games “in the U.S. than any other current-generation platform.”

Still, in terms of global dominance Sony Playstation 4 still boasts a lead on Microsoft, selling a reported 18.5 billion units worldwide compared to Xbox’s 10 million units. Now that Xbox seems to have agreed that the console sells best at $349, it will be interesting to watch the neck-and-neck console race throughout this year. With so many changes to the Xbox team of executives, as well as giving developers some extra width with the availability of a seventh core, and concentrating more on games and less on Kinect, it’s obvious that Microsoft’s Xbox One is not scared to reinvent itself. The changes are commendable when you look at sales figures, but still in many ways the price is the only big difference from the PS4. If Sony doesn’t want to fall too far behind, the company might have to make some changes too.

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