Ladies and gentlemen, despite all the discussion recently around the gaming industry crashing, prices going up, studios closing, layoffs happening across the board, today still felt like a massive gut punch to the gaming industry with Microsoft rolling out and as we’ve talked about with Nintendo ripping the band-aid off for an $80 game, ripping the band-aid off when it comes to the cost of some of these game consoles because it is at a point now where if you bought your Xbox Series X when it first arrived in 2020. It’s technically appreciated in value as more than four years later, we’re seeing some of these systems go up. $130, we have broken the $700 price barrier, guys. And I am not kidding. So, let’s take a look at that here today, guys. If you enjoy Let’s head over here to Pure Xbox. They make it very easy in this nice little chart here on their site. And I’ll go over some of this tomorrow in Newsweave, of course, because this this is a big time story and one that I think is going to have ramifications here. I mean, as soon as here in a few weeks, which we’ll get to, but also just in general for the rest of this generation and then starting up the next generation. So, uh, what we have here is Microsoft put out a press release discussing their prices on Xbox Series and their accessories as well as the games. Let’s talk about the consoles first, though. So, the Xbox Series X, the base system, the one that of course they launched in 2020 with the disc drive, that whole thing that was at $500, is now $600. It jumped $100. Okay, same with the digital version that was $450 now up to $550. But get this, the Series X two TBTE Galaxy Black Special Edition has moved from $600 to $730. That I mean, it’s crazy seeing that $700 mark there. This is in the US, but just across the right now globally, they they did a price increase and they have those all labeled there in this chart. Um the Series S 512 GB that launched of course at $300, now $380. And the Series S, I think it was an easy recommendation, especially when it was on sale for it was like $250 bucks at one point. That was an easy thing to just point out and be like, “Hey, that that’s a good value if you have Game Pass. It’s right there. It’s at that price with what it offers. I know it doesn’t have a disc drive, but it it’s still a capable system if you’re mostly looking at digital stuff anyway. No clue why that would be a recommendation. As well as even the Xbox Series X at 600. I mean, guys, the two terabyte at $730. I mean, going more than four and a half years now into the generation, we’re talking about these systems going up in price by a considerable amount. That’s not normal. That’s not going with historical trends. Although we kind of broke that with the Switch generation since 2017 when that came out, it never dropped in price. They had to introduce a new model technically with the Switch Light to get it to 200 by removing the thing that made it a switch in the first place where it was just a handheld. Couldn’t go on a dock and switch the TV. And technically, even throughout the generation, the OLED model raised the price $50, although they did at least put a a nicer screen in there. They added more storage. So in a way they dressed it up a bit to increase the price. Okay. But here with Microsoft this is just hey the price is going up and like that’s it. There was no finesse. And look for example hey the price has to go up for the Xbox Series X. It has to go up because we’re fighting these tariffs and we’ll get to that in a moment. Um but we have to do something. So we’re going to go up to $600 but we’re going to include six months of Game Pass Ultimate. you know, something like that to throw in the box to be like, hey, we’re trying to meet you halfway with this, okay? And they could say, hey, you know, hey, that’s a $120 value. We raised it 100, so there you go. And maybe in their mind, maybe they’ll stick around for after that and they’ll continue to be a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber, but like nothing, not at all. It’s just it’s $600 now for the base system. That’s just the way it is. Like just very cold and explicit and just that that’s that. Now, their accessory prices also went up. Like the wireless controller is 65. We’ve talked about the Switch 2 Pro controller at $90. So 65 is isn’t that, but it’s still okay. The price is going up there. Special edition 80. There’s the $90 price point there with the limited edition one. We have the series 2 uh elite controller, the core, that’s 150. The just this the elite controller with all the bells and whistles, little things that it comes with their attachments at 200. Uh the headsets in the US specifically they go up for the wired to 65 the wireless at 120. So accessories high margin products do go up to maintain we’ll say that uh that high margin. I do think the consoles themselves okay so they’re pointing to clearly I look a lot of people are saying okay the tariffs because look the Xbox Series consoles they are all coming out of China. We know there’s 145% tariff on China right now. Could change a week from now couldn’t change tomorrow. It’s always possible, but for now, Microsoft, they make their systems in batches to my understanding. So, they’re thinking, hey, these things are going to come into the port and there’s going to be a massive amount of money tacked on top. What do we do? They’re raising the price. Okay, that at least is the belief here when it comes to it. And you might say, okay, well, they didn’t raise 145% in the US. That’s true. They just raised it globally across the board. In their mind, hey, that’s going to help us pay for the tariffs. So, the rest of the world, sorry, this is just kind of how it is here. Um, but while there’s a lot of argument around what’s causing this, at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to, hey, whatever. The the price went up. That’s all I really care about. So, with that in mind, I don’t know why anyone would now start buying the Xbox when it’s this expensive. It’s just there there’s no real good recommendation for it at 730, $600 even. And that at least has a a Blu-ray drive on it, so of course you can take advantage of the used market. zero clue why you would buy a Series X digital 1 TBTE for 550 and then be locked into Game Pass or the digital storefront and just hope they have sales, you know, at some point. So, even this like again the Series S 380 I there’s no recommendation there. So, to me that means that uh they’re not really working to sell Xbox Series systems much at all. Before it was already questionable because they were doing things like, “Hey, everything’s an Xbox. You don’t need to buy our console.” Now it’s like, well, yeah, now that maybe they don’t even want to sell them. I don’t know because I I don’t know how you uh how you recommend someone buy a Series X at $600 four and a half years into the generation. Okay, the games though, if you already have your Xbox, like I already have Xbox consoles, PS5s, everything there. I I don’t need another system, which we’ll talk about Sony here in a moment as well. The games are also going up. Okay, they say we’ll adjust the pricing of some of our new firstp party games starting this holiday season to $79.99. This update will apply to physical and digital versions. That said, different games and expansions will continue to be offered at a variety of price points. They’ve tacked this on with the consoles, and people are also still talking about tariffs with the game prices. The game price point has been planned out, I think, for quite a while. We’ve heard publishers, third party especially, say, “Hey, the price needs to go up.” Capcom mentioned it what, like a year or two ago, even after the $70 move. Hey, it needs to be more expensive. Like, we feel our games are worth more. GTA 6 was most likely going to do it at the end of this year anyway. But Nintendo did jump ahead and rip the Bandit off. And yes, you can look to Nintendo and say they opened the floodgates because they absolutely didn’t. They were first mover with the $80 price point, which isn’t exactly the greatest spot to be as a first mover because, well, I mean, if you looked at what was happening here, thanks Nintendo or thank you Nintendo was trending on uh on Twitter X and with good reason because yeah, they’re technically to to blame, you could say, for introducing the $80 price point, even though I feel like most publishers and platform holders have kind of been kicking it around and trying to figure out how to get there for a while anyway. Now, it’s just easy to cite market conditions and and changes in terms of pricing and variable pricing or variety of price points and just say, “Hey, that’s just that’s kind of the way it is. So, we’re going to move there with some of our expensive franchises.” Then after seeing some of the the budgets around Call of Duty in those court documents that were putting this thing at 6 7 800 million a few years ago, Call of Duty might be close to a billion dollar budget franchise at this time with what uh Black Ops 7 is being rumored or something as being the next one up. So yeah, Call of Duty at the end of this year will most likely be 80. I wouldn’t be shocked if a Fortza Horizon was 80. Gears Eday will be 80. uh you’ll probably see Fable there. Really, any of the uh bigger budget or perceived bigger budget games will probably just be $80 and then yes, there’ll be an early access thing tacked on top for an additional 20 bucks or something. In a way, Microsoft has kind of found their way to the $100 price point for games, especially if you want to play it a few days early. But I think it’s important to remember that hardware pricing in general for consoles is fluid. Like they can change pretty consistently. We could see a year from now maybe it does return to the $500 price point. That is weird to think that we could be towards the end of the generation and we’d be lucky to get back to where the prices started in the first place in 2020. But that that software price that’s not going down like $80 is basically being normalized now by these publishers. And that’s the biggest takeaway for me. The hardware, the accessories, yeah, it’s annoying. It’s frustrating. Especially if you were maybe planning to get an Xbox this holiday season. Maybe you wanted to get a console for GTA 6 and you’re like, I’ll get it an Xbox cuz my friends are playing on Xbox and I’ll finally make the move. Well, now you have to re-evaluate, you know. And the thing for me though, coming away from this is the software price at 80, but then what’s next generation going to hold? Because right right now people are looking at Sony as the cheapest alternative because the PS5 has not gone up in price yet. Okay. So that’s the thing looking at this. The PS5 also comes out of China. I I don’t know how Sony doesn’t do something here when it comes to their own pricing in the US and I would look to them in the next uh week or so. They will be discussing things with investors for their uh their fiscal year, their financial earnings. And something tells me that’s going to come up. That question will it’s like how are you guys going to mitigate tariffs? What are your plans? And maybe they’ll even announce a price increase before then or at the very least a few weeks from now if they let’s say they have a showcase and they could put out good news and then the bad news. It’s like here’s a bunch of cool games but then also the price point around the system is going up. So that I feel like there’s going to be a bit more strategy from Sony as opposed to Microsoft who just showed up with a press release and was like, “Yeah, they’re just they’re just more expensive and that’s it.” Sony, I think, will try to figure out a way to kind of bury the information, but also put it alongside of maybe more uh good news or more exciting news with games. So, uh it’s it’s just uh interesting times now for gaming. Very different than it used to be. Several generations now breaking historical trends here with not only this generation, but next generation, guys. I’m telling you, we could be looking at a $700 to $800 system at launch, and that could be them subsidizing it. This is uh this is something else. At that point, I do question how things will continue for just the home console sector and uh how long say the PS5 and the Xbox series will stick around with a crossgen period. These right now could end up being 12 to 14ear systems just outright. That could be a legitimate thing and that is absolutely wild to think about right now. Also, Game Pass, they’re not raising the price on that. But what they should have said is we’re not raising the price on Game Pass at this time because if your games are $80, that means the perceived value then of those titles are up. They were looking to produce I’d say they said one big game per quarter. So four games a year. Okay. At $80, I would assume the price point of Game Pass will be rising probably after I’m going to say after their June showcase, it’ll rise to I’ll say $25 per month. Okay, that would most likely be the move. And again, it’s just getting expensive to play games like completely. So, I don’t blame people for sticking around with last generation or even looking backwards some of their back catalog or just maybe going and rediscovering hidden gems through just emulation. Like I said, I’ve been thinking about working on videos just about cheaper alternatives for game systems, building a tiny little PC for 100 bucks to emulate all kinds of cool stuff, for example. um or even going back and refurbishing older systems that you can get a ton of value out of. And maybe that’s what I’ll start doing is looking more into that because I again I look at these price points for uh where we are right now. How much do you really even call this like a a more casual hobby at this point when these are starting to look more and more like okay you’re getting closer to that that PC uh uh price point for a lot of this stuff and then you’re thinking more enthusiast and it’s like okay maybe I will just stick with my PS5 and my Xbox series that I already have for the next decade just so I can play my Call of Duties and my FIFAs and or or FC’s or you know what have you there but uh it’s uh Some crazy times right now in the industry. Curious how this is going to affect things obviously when it comes to Microsoft sales, but just sales in general, especially if the PS5 goes up and what their plans look like for next generation. But let me know what you with massive price jumps from Microsoft that basically were just, oh yeah, here they are. That’s it. Not even really a thought to it. Trying to mitigate any kind of uh any kind of impact or reaction to it. Yeah, they’re just it’s $100 more for the Xbox Series X now 4 and a half years later. Thanks guys for watching and I’ll see you next time.