Microsoft has officially upped the price of its Xbox consoles globally, and the reasons are pretty clear: rising costs for memory and storage chips. The premium Xbox Series X, which comes with a disc drive, will now set you back a whopping £670, compared to its previous price of £500. Meanwhile, the more basic Xbox Series S has seen its price jump to £430, marking a staggering 43% increase from the earlier price of £300.
This isn’t just Microsoft; a wave of tech companies have been forced to raise prices due to soaring component costs. Take Sony, for instance, which raised the price of its PlayStation 5 by £90 back in March. It’s a tough pill to swallow for gamers, especially when Microsoft had hinted in June that they wouldn’t raise prices. But here we are, with the company citing skyrocketing costs of storage and memory as the main culprits behind this sudden price hike.
Over in the US, the basic console prices have also experienced a jump of $100, now costing $499, while the version with added memory is now priced at $749—an increase of $150. If you’re in the EU, brace yourself because the Series S with more storage is going to cost you about €200 more than before. This trend of price hikes isn’t just limited to Xbox and PlayStation. Valve, the maker of Steam Machines, has also rolled out its PC-console hybrid at a price that took consumers by surprise, again citing rising hardware costs.
Once upon a time, random-access memory (RAM) was a cheap way to provide computers and gadgets with temporary memory. Now? Prices have shot up, largely due to the demand coming from AI firms. And it doesn’t stop there; graphics cards—essential for gaming consoles and PCs—have also seen a surge in price because of their increasing use in generating AI content.
But here’s the kicker: big tech companies are facing backlash for passing these costs onto consumers, especially when it means shelling out jaw-dropping amounts for products that have been on the market for years. Users on platforms like X and Reddit haven’t held back. One user, @BlackPanthaa, slammed the new Xbox Series S price as “absolutely disgusting,” and another Redditor echoed similar sentiments.
People are getting anxious, wondering how high console prices can actually go. “This ain’t even the ceiling,” one user remarked, and it’s hard not to agree. The gaming community is left looking at what’s next: are we heading towards even steeper price increases?
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Kaynak: Orijinal Haber