Were you in the $500 camp all along?
At long last, Xbox’s next-gen pricing is in our rearview mirror. Thanks to revisionist memories, everyone’s an accurate industry expert in moments like this. “That’s the price I was saying all along!” Yet it’s Pachter, not you, who gets all the respect.
(In case you somehow missed the news, the Xbox Series X is launching on November 10 and priced at $500. The lesser-powered Xbox Series S was also formally unveiled yesterday and will be priced at $300 and launch on the same day.)
Today is not only a landmark moment for forward-facing console war marketing strategies (at least for one side), but it’s also the conclusion to what we’ve been blindly stabbing at for nine months. “The things it wants to accomplish are impressive for a console, but how much will it cost?” Now we know, and now we can start making some purchasing decisions.
So, it’s time for you to own it — not necessarily the console, but your past opinion. Where did you think the Xbox Series X was gonna fall? Personally, I think I remember boldly venturing it’d be $400 before I was sure the Series S existed. This was mostly predicated on Phil Spencer saying Project Scarlett “[would] not be out of position on power or price.” I thought Microsoft was will to take a significant loss on every machine sold in order to really start this generation on the right foot.
But, now that two models have been confirmed, $500 seems like the obvious price. It always felt like $600 was too high, as no one wants to relive the 60GB PS3 launch debacle. So, $300 and $500 feels like the sweet spot. One device is for introduction to the Xbox ecosystem, the other is for those who are looking for the most out of their console. Putting $200 worth of space between them intrinsically communicates the gap in horsepower.
What were you expecting? Less? More? Also, this seems like as good of a place as any to formally chime in with your PS5 pricing prediction. That way, if you claim to have been right all along, we can check the comments here and call you a filthy liar. Unless you actually were right — in which case, refer back to my Pachter comment in the first paragraph.