Xbox Series X price hiked by £170 due to rising memory chip costs
BBC
Xbox Series X just got a £170 price hike, and Series S went up too. Blame AI's hunger for memory chips—your six-year-old console is now pricier than ever.
Based on reporting by BBC — read the original for the full story.
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Microsoft has quietly turned the Xbox Series X into a much more expensive proposition, tacking on £170 to the console's price tag. The Series S, long pitched as the budget option, hasn't escaped either. Neither machine is new—both launched back in 2020—yet somehow they're getting costlier rather than cheaper, which runs against basically every rule of consumer electronics pricing.
The culprit isn't greed alone, though plenty of gamers online suspect otherwise. RAM chips, once dirt-cheap commodity parts, have spiked in cost partly because AI companies are buying up memory at scale to train and run their models. Graphics cards, essential to both gaming rigs and AI workloads, are caught in the same squeeze. When Nvidia and its rivals can sell chips to data centers at premium prices, console makers suddenly find themselves competing for the same silicon.
Reaction has been blunt. Streamer BlackPanthaa called the Series S pricing "absolutely disgusting" on X, while a Reddit thread branded the whole situation "highway robbery for a console released 6 years ago." Windows Central's Jez Corden added an ominous note, warning that current price hikes might not even be the peak—suggesting Xbox owners haven't seen the worst of it yet.
This lands at an awkward moment for Microsoft's gaming division, which just posted declining revenue and, back in July, cut roughly 3,200 jobs in what executives themselves labeled the most drastic restructuring in Xbox's history. Amazon's gaming chief recently told the BBC that rising hardware costs could push more players toward game streaming instead of buying consoles outright—a shift that, if it accelerates, would only deepen the pressure on traditional console makers already struggling to justify their price tags.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Blaming AI demand for a six-year-old console suddenly costing £170 more is the kind of excuse that only works because nobody can easily fact-check a chip supply chain. Companies love a convenient macro trend to hide behind when margins need protecting, and gamers—who have exactly zero leverage here—get to eat the difference. If streaming really does become the escape valve Amazon's exec predicts, console makers might want to ask themselves why loyalty evaporates the moment price stops matching value.
Read more about this at: BBC
