Xbox Prices in Europe Jump by Up to €200 - a Series S Now Costs Series X Launch Money

€499.99 used to buy you the most powerful console Microsoft had ever made. Since August 1st, it buys you a Series S - the small white one without a disc drive.

Microsoft announced the price hike back in June, but only gave US numbers and kept the European figures under wraps until the moment they took effect. Now we know why. The Series S 512GB went up by €150, and every 1TB model by €200. The new prices: Series S 512GB at €499.99, Series S 1TB at €599.99, Series X Digital at €749.99, and the Series X with a disc drive at €799.99. Eurogamer calculates that consoles in the UK are now 34 to 49 percent more expensive than they were a month ago.

The official reason, and the real problem

The official reason is the memory crunch: DRAM and NAND prices have exploded on the back of AI-industry demand, and consoles are full of both. Fair enough - the same shortage has been pushing up RAM and SSD prices for months, and anyone who's built a PC lately has felt it. What's remarkable is Microsoft's answer to it: pass the whole cost on to the customer, mid-generation, on five-year-old hardware.

That breaks a rule that held for decades - consoles got cheaper as a generation went on, not more expensive. The Series X now costs €300 more than it did at its 2020 launch.

In our region this stings more than the averages suggest. €800 for a console is a very different conversation here than it is in Munich. So here's my prediction: the second-hand market is about to heat up. A used Series X became one of the smarter buys on local classifieds overnight - and if you already own one, congratulations, your console just appreciated in value, which consoles are by definition not supposed to do.

The bigger question is who this hardware is even for now. Microsoft has spent years telling us that Xbox is really Game Pass on any screen - your TV, a handheld, the cloud, your PC. At €799.99, the console itself starts to look like expensive merchandise for that strategy. Maybe that's the plan. But if you were waiting for the price to come down, stop waiting - this generation, prices only move in one direction.

Image: Microsoft / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:X_Xbox_Series_X_S_black.png