Xbox Game & Console Prices Increased Across The Board

Seemingly following Nintendo's bold strategy to increase the price of their games and consoles Xbox too has decided to increase the price of many of their products offered to us consumers. This was met with frustration and pushback as to many it feels like $70 games was just recently pushed to be the norm and now we're jumping up yet again. Let's get into what's going on at Microsoft and their pricing structure.

Microsoft cited that "market conditions" were the primary reason for the increase in their software and hardware over at the Xbox division, we've seen the Series S, X, their controllers as well as some first party games increase in price. This far along into the console life cycle you'd be expecting there to be good sales and price drops to push some further purchases but we're seeing the exact opposite. These increases have raised concerns over the affordability and accessibility of Xbox products especially in developing markets around the world. It's thought that the tariffs imposed by the US on China has also had a factor in these happenings.

Gamepass, which has always been one of Xbox's strong services hasn't yet been affected by price increases however who knows what the future will hold for it. Some notable figures have stated that they no longer predict a large growth in Xbox gamepass subscribers, this is mainly due to the release of Xbox games to PS5 and other platforms. There's less reason for potential customers to use Microsoft's console when they can play the exact same games on their gaming hardware of choice and potentially have access to even more games, Playstation has their own PS Plus service anyways so why buy a whole new console to play Starfield, Indiana Jones or Halo when you can just wait a little while and have them release on your console anyways.

The company originally expected to roll out the price increase for their first party games this holiday season but it seems that some change of heart is occurring, the upcoming Outer Worlds 2, created by Obsidian had it's pre-orders going at $80 but they released a post recently stating that the price has been dropped to $70, they'll be issuing refunds of the difference to all those who bought it for the original price. This is good news but also makes us wonder whether the pre-order sales were so low that they had no choice but to drop the price. We'll have to wait and see what happens to other first party titles going forward, we're interested to see what the likes of Fable and State of Decay 3 get listed as.

After all the layoffs and negative news surrounding Microsoft and Xbox they're treading on thin ice with their fans and the company needs to start gaining the trust and goodwill of it's users again, we'll see what the future holds but for now we remain cautious.