Xbox consoles and Microsoft games get more expensive worldwide

It might have been expected by many – even inevitable in the eyes of some – but it’s still bad news for more consumers than anyone anticipated, so it’s a business decision worth a closer look: Microsoft announced that it’s raising the prices of most Xbox consoles and peripherals, worldwide, effective immediately. The company did not explicitly mention the increased tariffs imposed by the Trump administration as the reason behind this decision, but things between tech companies and the current US president are somewhat tense at times, so this is an “adjustment” that was made “given market conditions and the rising cost of development”. Right.

As experienced business analyst Daniel Ahmad explains on Twitter, Xbox consoles and certain Xbox accessories are subject to tariffs of 145% when entering the United States because they are manufactured in China. If those tariffs were fully applied to Xbox products sold in the US, they would drive their pricing to absolutely ridiculous heights – so Microsoft decided to increase the prices of said products globally, at a decidedly lower rate, in order to soften the blow to its home market.

As one can clearly see in the table above, this allowed the US pricing of these Xbox products to only go up by around 20%-30% instead of way, way more, but it resulted in the same price increases everywhere else in the world. This is obviously unfair to consumers e.g. in the European Union, the United Kingdom and Australia, who will now have to pay around 25% more for the same products as before, despite their countries not being involved in a trade war with China. Every company is entitled to shaping its trade and commercial policies as it sees fit, though, so… here we are.

Even a cursory look at the prices of certain Xbox models reveals how serious a problem this is for Microsoft in terms of market positioning: the Xbox Series X at $599 is now more expensive than the current market leader, the PS5, and not much cheaper than the most expensive console currently available, the PS5 Pro. What’s more, consumers interested in getting the XSX model sporting the 2TB SSD, like the one the PS5 Pro offers, will now have to pay more than what Sony’s most expensive model currently goes for. The Xbox Series S was a good deal at $299 but now, at $379, it sits dangerously close to the PS5 Digital Edition Astro Bot bundle ($399).

Needless to say, if this whole situation does not change soon, it may very well be the final nail in the coffin of the current Xbox console generation. The Xbox Series have been underperforming for years, not least because of Microsoft’s choice to insist that PCs, TVs, tablets and smartphones are all Xbox machines too (and its decision to offer once-exclusive Xbox games to PlayStation and Switch). Being more expensive than their PlayStation counterparts makes both Xbox models even less attractive to consumers. Microsoft may be claiming that it’s not overly concerned with its console sales numbers, but this makes the Xbox brand no favors at all long-term.

Microsoft games getting more expensive is not just an Xbox problem

In the same announcement about most Xbox hardware products getting more expensive, Microsoft noted that “some” of their new first-party games will also “adjust” to $79.99 this holiday season. This could partially have to do with tariffs imposed on Mexico (much of the disc printing and packaging of Xbox games takes place in that country), but the company confirmed that the new pricing applies to digital copies purchased on the Xbox Store too (which is unrelated to the US-China trade wars). These titles offer Xbox Play Anywhere support – so they can be enjoyed on PCs too – but this may or may not be of interest to the millions of Xbox gamers out there.

While Xbox consoles getting more costly worldwide is not good news for anyone, what most gamers are rightly concerned about – since those products’ prospects were not great anyway – is the pricing of Microsoft’s own games going forward. The company’s decision to increase that price from $69.99 to $79.99 is unlikely to be taken back, even if the US-China tariff wars de-escalate at some point in the future: this price increase is something most games publishers have been pushing for anyway and chances are that Microsoft just jumped at the chance of making that “adjustment” now, taking advantage of the current climate of global financial uncertainty.

This would have been bad enough even if it was just an Xbox problem but, sadly, it’s not that simple: Nintendo also decided to go for that $79.99 sticker in the case of Mario Kart World for the upcoming Switch 2 recently, so now two out of three console platform holders have effectively moved up to a higher price point for their most important AAA games. What’s more, Microsoft is now a multi-format mega-publisher, meaning that any of its major releases – for any system, not just the Xbox – could come with that $79.99 sticker later in the year.

The first such title is widely expected to be the new Call of Duty, which will be coming out for the PS5/PS5 Pro too… making it the first 80-dollar Standard-Edition PlayStation game (ironically not published by Sony). There aren’t many other new Microsoft multi-format titles scheduled for 2025 that would warrant a $79.99 price tag, but the company could put such a sticker on certain rumored high-quality PS5 ports, such as Starfield or Gears of War. It seems that other multi-format releases, like Doom: The Dark Ages that’s coming out soon, will be adopting the current, lower pricing (the announcement specifically talks about “holiday season”). But, come 2026, most Microsoft-published AAA multi-format titles are expected to be released at the new, higher price point.

Whether Sony will decide to follow Microsoft’s and Nintendo’s example with certain AAA PlayStation titles this year – such as Ghost of Yotei – is anybody’s guess at this point. Third-party publishers, though, would be happy to do exactly that with their most popular franchises sooner rather than later (as it happened in 2020 during the launch of the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles). As a result, gaming will become a considerably more expensive pastime in 2025. It will be interesting to see what consumers think about all this, no?