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Xbox head Phil Spencer has said there aren’t any plans for the Xbox Series line of consoles to receive permanent price drops further down the line.
Speaking to Eurogamer at Gamescom, Spencer was asked about whether or not there are any plans for current Xbox hardware to lower its price considering that component costs generally reduce over the lifespan of a console. Price drops have been pretty common for previous generation of consoles, but Spencer said that that won’t be the case for the current generation, as the Xbox Series S was designed with that in mind.
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“The prices aren’t coming down. We see it now, and that’s why we did Xbox Series S,” Spencer said. “I know there’s a bunch of questions like, ‘what is it doing?’ We wanted to make sure we had a sub-$300 console because we want to grow, and we think an entry level price point for many new families or players coming into the market is going to be important. And then people say, ‘Well, now you’ve created complexity, because you have two specs in the market.’ But then we get into this world of ‘I want to mid-gen refresh, so we should create more complexity by creating more devices.”
Spencer went on to note that in the context of reaching more customers, having a good price point is important, but “you’re not going to be able to start with a console that’s $500 thinking it’s gonna get to 200 bucks. That won’t happen.” According to Spencer, this is because it’s not as easy to buy components as a hardware maker “because nobody’s making that kind of RAM or other components. It’s not the way it used to be where you could take a spec and then ride it out over 10 years and ride the price points down. It’s why you see console pricing relatively flat.”
The full interview is worth a read, as Spencer also spoke of some of the other ways Xbox is thinking about bringing in more players, notably making its games available in more places like on console and PC, and through Game Pass and cloud streaming.
Microsoft actually raised the price of the Xbox Series X back in June in several territories, which it attributed to the “competitive conditions in each market.” However, the price of the Series S stayed the same, and there don’t seem to be any plans for that to change.
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