Recently on his Level Up Blog, N'Gai Croal brought to light a blog posting by Xbox Director of Strategy, and avid 19th century poem fan, Andre "Ozymandias" Vrignaud, in which he states that the price drop announced at E3 and subsequent European Value pack bundle are nothing more than a "everything must go" clearance, in which Sony will make way for new skus, gutted systems, and cheaper prices by Holiday 07.

In his blog, Vrignaud predicts:

...that you're going to see the creation of a new, low-end SKU this holiday. It'll likely remove integrated WiFi, memory card reader, and most controversially, all backward compatibility. (Remember, there's still some back-compat hardware in even the new "software only" back compat SKUs; removing the remaining CPU is a significant cost savings.) You'll see a new WiFi dongle made available. And finally, this low-end SKU will likely come with a smaller 40 GB hard drive. The low-end price will be set at $399, with the higher-end 80 GB SKU dropping to $499.

Intrigued by Mr. King of King's prediction, N'Gai contacted him to give his own prediction, stating he thinks that:

...for the remainder of 2007 after store shelves had been cleared of the 60 gigabyte PS3: one SKU, $499.

With the predictions thrown out, Vrignaud did what any good microsoft employee would do, he challenged Croal to a bet.

The stakes? Well..steak. Vancouver steak, at that. If Vrignaud's prediction comes true by Black Friday, the official start of the Holiday sales season, then Croal will have to treat Vrignaud to a fine steak dinner at a fancy Vancouver steak restaurant. If it doesn't come to light, and Croal's prediction of just a single, $499 sku is true, then Vrignaud will treat the crew of Level Up to the dinner.

Keep in mind, Vrignaud eats, sleeps, and breathes pro-Microsoft, so it's not so surprising that he's being so hard on Sony. In this case, however, I think the more likely prediction is Croal's, it doesn't seem likely that we'll see an even cheaper PS3 by this holiday season, and even if we did, I doubt it'd be so stripped of features.

Then again, so long as you can watch Talladega Nights on da Blurayz, why would you need things like backwards compatibility and wifi? Anyone? Anyone?

[Via Level Up]