Friday, the new prices announced by Microsoft for its Xbox consoles will come into effect, spicing up the competition between Sony, Nintendo and the aforementioned company.

For some models, the prices are said to go down by almost 30%.

The Xbox Arcade will suffer a price cut from $279 to $199, the basic 60 GB hard drive Xbox 360 model will drop from $299 to $349, while the high-end Xbox 360 Elite, which features a 120GB hard drive, will go from $449 to $399.

A statement inviting “everyone to play” was released on the Xbox web site in order to let users know of the coming slashing of the consoles’ prices.

Microsoft’s move renders the low-end Xbox model cheaper than the Nintendo Wii console, which now costs $250.

The Xbox 360 is the company’s second video console, having been developed in cooperation with International Business Machines Corporation, a multinational computer technology and consulting corporation, ATI Technologies, designer and supplier of graphics processing units, motherboard chipsets and video display cards and also Silicon Integrated Systems, a company that manufactures motherboard chipsets.

It was unveiled on May 12 2005 on MTV, selling out on release in every region but Japan. According to data from Microsoft, 19 million units had been sold up to April 25, 2008.

The Xbox 360, which is part of the seventh-generation of video game consoles, comes as Xbox’s successor, the first console to incorporate a hard disk drive, thus eliminating the need for separate memory cards.

The console’s competition on the market consists of Nintendo's Wii and Sony’s PlayStation 3 consoles.