Video game companies must be becoming furious with retailers, as every game launch, price drop, and secret announcement is eventually leaked via a flyer or poor management, or both. This week’s instance involves the Xbox 360 Premium, in which a scanned Kmart flyer shows a $50 price drop, from $350 to $299. Not only that, but the flyer is supposed to be going out for the week of July 6th, a full week before E3 begins. One would think that this drop would be reserved for an event announcement, but maybe Microsoft has something else up their sleeve for the show, and would rather treat the price-drop as an incentive for their future products, instead of their “big reveal.”

No word yet on whether or not this price drop will effect the $450 Premium or $280 Core systems, but I would assume that this would mean a price drop for them as well. Keeping the Core at just $20 from the premium doesn’t really seem logical, and if they could drop it to $250 they would finally have a competitive price point against the Nintendo Wii. If the Premium drops to $400, which would set it next to the standard PS3, meaning that the highest tier of Xbox 360 would meet the lowest tier of PlayStation 3’s, setting the console in an extremely competitive price point.

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