It’s official (almost). ‘Insiders’ and ‘tipsters’ left right and central have been dropping off ‘dirt’ with blurry camera phone photos to accompany. Walmart has reportedly started the printing of summer blowout flyers, advertising the premium console at $50, with Toys ‘R’ Us already offering a $50 gift card/rebate to those who buy the premium edition. August 8th is the price-cut date, and if reports are correct, that should be just in time for the widely anticipated BioShock’s scheduled release, alongside other games such as Blue Dragon, and Halo 3 - expected later this year.

Xbox-Scene again are reporting, alongside Kotaku and Gizmodo, the 8th August pricedrop, but again, the news coming from a different external, reliable source. Although sources have denied to speculate whether the whole line of 360s will be getting a pricecut, it stands to reason that in order to keep the pressure on the Nintendo Wii, and the grossly overpriced PS3, Microsoft’s marketing team will be eager to push the core package as close to the Wii’s price as possible, whilst maintaining a healthy profit margin, made easier by the spiralling production cost in recent months of the hardware used within the 360.

Confusion is rife, however, and Microsoft employees are contradicting themselves in each and every statement that reaches us, here, at TechZi. Just three weeks ago, corporate vice president Shane Kim told SeattlePi.com that “July is a very odd time to announce a price reduction”, before going on to say that Microsoft felt “no pressure to react to anything that Sony has done”, referring to the PS3’s recent pricedrop. If indeed though, the company goes ahead with what is looking like an almost certain pricedrop, Kim’ll be feeling a lil’ silly, seeing that the news got out in… Uh… July. via technabob