A Reported €900 for a Six-Year-Old Xbox: The X25 Anniversary Price Is a Tough Sell

Eight hundred and ninety-nine euros and ninety-nine cents. That is the number doing the rounds for Microsoft's 25th anniversary Xbox, and I had to read it twice.

The leak comes from billbil-kun at Dealabs, who has an unusually good track record on this stuff. According to him, the Xbox Series X25 Limited Edition - translucent green, retro-inspired, anniversary logo on the front - lands on 27th November, Black Friday, at €899.99. That is the same money as a PS5 Pro in Europe, and roughly €100 above a standard 1TB Series X with a disc drive. Microsoft hasn't confirmed any of it; the company has only said the console arrives in November.

So what does the extra money buy? Per the same leak: nothing, technically. It's the same 1TB Series X with the disc drive, plus a matching limited edition anniversary controller in the box. The pad is also said to be sold separately from 20th October at €79.99. Do that arithmetic and the "premium" for the shell itself is somewhere around twenty euros, which is honestly not outrageous for a collectible.

The problem isn't the markup. The problem is the base it's stacked on.

Nine hundred euros for 2020 silicon

Series X came out in November 2020. The internals in this thing are, if the leak is right, exactly those internals - a machine that has been through price increases rather than the usual mid-life cuts, so that in 2026 you're being asked for near-PS5 Pro money for a console that is nearly six years old. Sony at least gives you newer hardware for that price. Here you're paying for green plastic and a birthday.

And for players in our region there's a second layer. Limited runs almost never show up in local retail in any real quantity. What actually happens is that a handful land in the big chains, sell out in an afternoon, and then reappear on resale listings at a markup, sealed, described as an investment. We've watched this exact cycle with anniversary controllers, special edition handhelds, and every Nintendo thing that ever had a colour variant. If you genuinely want one, you're either importing or paying somebody's flip.

I don't want to be sour about a nice-looking console. The original Xbox's translucent green is a genuinely lovely piece of design history and Microsoft is right to lean on it - the 25th anniversary is a real milestone, and Xbox has had a rough couple of years of messaging where a bit of nostalgia does no harm.

But let's call it what it is. This is a shelf piece, not a purchase decision. If you want an Xbox, buy the standard one and put the €100 into a year of Game Pass or an actual game. If you want the look, the controller on its own gets you 90 percent of the way there for under eighty euros. And if you want the whole boxed thing on your shelf, fine - just go in knowing you're buying a souvenir, not a value proposition.

Everything above is still a leak. I'd love for Microsoft to come out in the next few weeks and make me look silly with a lower number.

Image: Kyu3a / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Xbox_Series_X%E3%81%A8Series_S.jpg