Xbox are raising their hardware prices today, games later this year
Xbox have announced that their hardware is increasing in price, well most of it at least, as the basic controllers are not changing price points here in Australia. Microsoft have provided a statement around the increase.
“As of May 1, we have adjusted recommended retailer pricing for our consoles and controllers worldwide. We also expect to adjust the pricing of some of our new, first-party games starting this holiday season to USD $79.99. Those titles purchased on the Xbox store have the benefit of Xbox Play Anywhere, allowing players to buy once and play on console and PC at no additional cost. We understand that these changes are challenging, and they were made with careful consideration given market conditions and the rising cost of development. Looking ahead, we continue to focus on offering more ways to play more games across any screen, and ensuring value for Xbox players”
There is also a FAQ put up by Xbox, that might answer some of your burning questions.
The prices for the consoles have not changed in Australia since each model was released, the 512gb Series S launched at $499 and its beefier brother launched at $749. What makes this fairly hard to understand is that in the recent financial reports from Microsoft, they reported that their hardware revenue was down 6%, but Game Pass is up 8%. What this says is that people are signing up for Game Pass or upgrading tiers, but not getting new hardware to play on, which suits the Xbox strategy of everything is Xbox.
The problem with that, is if people are not buying your consoles to play your games, upping the price of those consoles, means that people will definitely not buy your console. So, I can’t imagine that this is a decision that is meant to make the company more money, and that is not something they need to worry about anyway. As per their recent quarterly earnings report the company made $70.1b USD (about $110b AUD) in revenue and had a net income of $25.8b USD (about $40b AUD), so they are not lacking for money. For extra information, the Xbox group made around $12.60b USD (about $20b AUD) and had a net income of $2.92b USD (about $4.5b AUD), so they have quite a bit of cash available to them.
This to me means that raising the price of consoles and claiming it’s for “ensuring the value of Xbox players” is just PR speak, and the real reason is they don’t want to lose money if they can help it.
These are the new prices of each item, with the old price beside for comparison. You can also view the official document here.
Series X
Digital - $749 - Was $699
1TB - $849 - Was $799
2TB - $1,049 - Was $999
Series S
512GB - $549 - Was $499
1TB - $599 - Was $549
Controllers
Standard - $99.95 - No Change
Special Colour - $104.95 - No Change
Special Edition - $119.95 - Was $99.95
Limited Edition - $129.95 - Was $109.95
Wireless Elite Series 2 Core - $229.95 - Was $199.95
Wireless Elite Series 2 Full - $279.95 - Was $249.95
Xbox Design Lab pricing has not been altered at this time.
The other aspect of the news is that game prices will also increase, but there is a catch, it won’t be all games, and it won’t be until later this year. We know that Microsoft have said games will have a new price of $79.99 USD, but we don’t know what the local price will be, $119.95 seems likely but it could be more. There was also no word on what games they would be on outside of it being First-party titles. Even today there are some Xbox published games that have released at a much cheaper price than what you would see on something like Halo.
Local retailers have not increased the prices just yet, but that could happen any day now, so if you wanted to get a console for yourself, you had best get onto it.
