Microsoft is rumored to be preparing an Xbox One without a Blu-ray drive that could be sold for $399 at retail. That would knock $100 off the current Xbox One price of $499 and bring it in line with the $399 rival Sony charges for its PlayStation 4.

The rumor comes from gaming site VG247, which on Friday published a report claiming that an unnamed source had confirmed a detail about a new Xbox One SKU without a physical media player that cropped up in a treasure trove of Xbox rumors appearing this week on gaming forum NeoGaf.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Possibly adding some validity to the NeoGaf rumors and VG247's reporting was a Kotaku post on Friday that claimed yet another unnamed source at Microsoft has said the software giant is "currently trying to track down and identify 'ntkrnl'," the online handle of the NeoGaf leaker.

The Xbox One has sold briskly since its release on Nov. 22, and by some accounts it outsold the PS4 in December. Other market watchers pegged Sony as the early leader in units sold after the first few weeks of the next-gen console wars, with the price difference between the Xbox One and PS4 cited as one factor drawing consumers to the Sony camp.

If Microsoft does release an Xbox One without a Blu-ray drive, it would bring to fruition a persistent rumor hatched before the successor to the Xbox 360 was even released, namely that the new console would abandon physical media for a pure-play cloud distribution scheme for games and media content.

Redmond has of course been pushing cloud distribution of content for its new console, while leaks supposedly pointing to future tweaks to the Xbox platform code named Fortaleza suggest that the elimination of physical media on the console is inevitable.

But there's also another interesting way to look at the rumored price drop Microsoft would purportedly achieve by dumping Blu-ray in a new SKU. When IHS iSuppli did a teardown of the Xbox One last November to determine a bill-of-materials (BOM) estimate, the research firm figured that the bundling of the Kinect 2.0 sensor was the primary driver of the $100 difference in price between Microsoft's system and the PS4.

IHS figured that Microsoft was only spending about $32 on Blu-ray drives from Lite-On for the Xbox One. Since Redmond may already be selling its new consoles at a loss, per the research firm, would it really make sense to lose even more, assuming the BOM numbers from IHS are correct?

Now, if Microsoft was planning to offer an Xbox One without Kinect, the rumored price cut to $399 would sound a lot more plausible. But the software giant has made it pretty clear that its vision for the Xbox platform has Kinect as an integral, can't-do-without-it component, so that seems unlikely to happen.

UPDATE: Geek.com reported Monday that Microsoft has denied any plans to release a $399 Xbox One. PCMag's sister site also pointed to the following tweet from Aaron Greenberg, chief of staff for the Devices and Studios Group at Microsoft, made in direct response to a question about the cheaper Xbox One rumor:

@TheAnchormanV No, you cannot believe everything you read on the internet.. — Aaron Greenberg (@aarongreenberg) February 1, 2014

For more, see our full reviews of Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4 .

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