Microsoft's Xbox price increase hit Europe and the UK on 1 August: the disc Xbox Series X is now £669.99 and €799.99, and the entry Series S rose 43% in a single day. Microsoft blames memory and storage costs it says have risen more than 2.5x.
Read the full story: Xbox Prices Jump Up To £170 In The UK And €200 In Europe →
Transcript
Consoles are supposed to get cheaper. This one just went the other way, hard. On the first of August, Xbox prices moved across the UK and Europe, and Microsoft never told those markets what the numbers would be. The disc Xbox Series X went from four ninety nine to six sixty nine ninety nine in Britain. That's a hundred and seventy pounds, overnight. Every one terabyte model took the same hit, which means the cheapest console, the little Series S, posted the biggest jump. Forty three percent, in a day. So why? Memory. Microsoft says console storage and memory prices have gone up more than two and a half times, and it expects them to double again by autumn twenty twenty seven. Consoles sell at or below cost, so there's no margin to absorb that. A PlayStation 5 with a disc drive now undercuts the Series X by a hundred pounds. And if Microsoft's own forecast is right, this is not the last time.