Microsoft said Thursday it will raise the price of its Xbox video game consoles worldwide by $100 to $150 starting August 1, blaming a component-cost surge fueled by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
In the United States, the cheapest Xbox, the Series S, will increase to $500 this summer, and the Series X will increase to as much as $800. The company has not yet released prices for Europe, where the Series X currently sells for around 600 euros.<\/p>\n
The 2 terabyte model will be discontinued.<\/p>\n
This is the third price increase for Xbox after a worldwide hike in May 2025 and a second, limited to the United States, in October.<\/p>\n
All consumer electronics are affected by price hikes for tech components: in recent months, Sony and Nintendo have also raised the prices of their game consoles, and Apple announced on Thursday substantial increases for its Macs and iPads.<\/p>\n
The accelerated construction of data centers for AI training and applications has sent the cost of memory and storage chips soaring. They are found in virtually all electronic devices.<\/p>\n
This market \u2014 dominated by giants such as South Korea\u2019s Samsung and SK Hynix and US-based Micron \u2014 has suffered from major shortages for several months, which has driven prices up.<\/p>\n
The cost of storage and memory has more than doubled and is expected to double again by late 2027, Microsoft said on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The Redmond, Washington\u2013based company also noted that consoles, unlike phones or computers, \u201care typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.\u201d<\/p>\n
Its Japanese rival Sony raised the price of its PlayStation 5 by 100 euros in Europe in early April, bringing the standard version to 650 euros.<\/p>\n
Nintendo has announced an increase of more than 6% as of September 1 for its Switch 2. On Monday, US-based Valve launched its new Steam Machine at over $1,000 for the base version, more expensive than expected.<\/p>\n
The third-largest console maker after Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft had conversely cut the price of its Xbox Game Pass subscription in April, which players considered too expensive.<\/p>\n
Microsoft\u2019s gaming division, which accounted for about 8% of its revenue in its fiscal year 2025, underwent a major restructuring in February amid declining revenue, particularly from Xbox sales, and disappointing performance from new games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft said Thursday it will raise the price of its Xbox video game consoles worldwide by $100 to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":760862,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,3389,210250,105,2489],"class_list":["post-760861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-international","tag-mna","tag-technology","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/760862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}