Xbox Series X is now £670 in UK as Microsoft sneak price hike out at weekend

Microsoft has quietly revealed the new price hikes for the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S in the UK, with massive increases of up to £170.

If an American company wants to bury bad news in Europe, then the easiest way to do it is by announcing something after 5pm on a Friday. By that point it’s 6pm on the Continent and most UK outlets have also gone home for the weekend.

Microsoft has gone one step further with the pricing of Xbox consoles and while it’s not entirely clearly when the information was revealed (there was so certainly no formal annoucement) it seems to have happened late on Saturday afternoon.

As you can imagine from that, it’s not good news, with all models of console increasing by over £150 and the disc-less Xbox Series X jumping by £170, from £499.99 to £669.99 – at a time when Xbox console sales are already perilously low.

Xbox announced price rises for the Xbox back in June but, just like Nintendo and its upcoming price hike for the Switch 2, Microsoft didn’t bother to say exactly what the increase would be in the UK.

Now that they have, it’s obvious why they were trying to be secretive about it, as the changes are absolutely eye-watering. The reason given back in June was the ‘current component costs crisis’, which is entirely fair and the same reason the PlayStation 5 suffered a £90 price hike in March.

Well, it’s entirely fair in that the component crisis isn’t Xbox’s fault (or at least not directly – the crisis is because AI data centres are using up all the RAM and hard drives, which Microsoft as a whole has certainly been encouraging). Clearly, though, this makes the Xbox an incredibly unpalatable prospect, especially given the company’s poor reputation at the moment, following endless layoffs and its confused approach to multiformat releases.

What makes the situation even worse is that there’s a good chance prices could go up yet further, since Microsoft is apparently still selling the consoles at a loss, even with this latest increase.

The prices you see here are in effect already, indeed the only reason anyone knows about them is because the Microsoft website suddenly updated to reflect them. So there’s not even a grace period to buy them at the previous prices, beyond the vague warning in June.

This is probably how the Nintendo Switch 2 price rise is going to work too, when it comes into effect on September 1 – so be warned if you’re planning to get one as a Christmas present.

This isn’t even the first price rise for the Xbox, which, like the PlayStation 5, is now considerably more expensive than it was at launch – an unheard of state of affairs for the games industry, where hardware prices are expected to decrease over time, especially with consoles this old.

At launch, almost six years ago now, the Xbox Series X was £449.99 and the Xbox Series S was just £249.99. The latter was intended to be a low cost, slightly less powerful model that would undercut both Sony and Nintendo.

Like most Xbox ideas, it made sense in theory but hasn’t worked out as intended. The model proved far less popular than expected and was accused by some of holding back Xbox Series X game development. Now that it’s so expensive it’s only a surprise that Microsoft hasn’t just discontinued it.

The wider ramifications of all this, especially given all companies have been increasing their prices, is that the price of PlayStation 6 and the next gen Xbox are clearly going to be outrageously expensive, and very likely not a mass market proposition. So where that puts the future of console gaming is a very genuine concern.

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