Here we go once again

Greater than normal inflation can assist discuss a few of the small rate boosts for the earliest Xbox consoles impacted by today’s cost walkings. The $300 for an Xbox Series S at launch in November 2020 is worth approximately $375 in August 2025 dollars. And the $500 for an Xbox Series X in 2020 is now worth about $625.

The especially sharp cost boosts for more current Xbox setups can’t truly utilize that inflation reason. The disc-drive-free Digital Xbox Series X Digital and 2TB “Galaxy Special Edition” are now a massive 33 percent more pricey than they were at launch in October 2024. A year’s worth of inflation would represent just a little portion of that.

Even accounting for inflation, however, the present wave of small console rate boosts breaks a near-universal, decades-long pattern of video game console costs dropping substantially in the years following their launch. Those days appear well and genuinely gone now, as console makers’ expenses stay high thanks in part to present tariff unpredictability and in part to the larger downturn of Moore’s Law.

We’ll see simply just how much the marketplace can bear aging console hardware that increases in rate gradually instead of reductions. Up until and unless customers begin balking, it looks like ever-increasing console rates are here to remain.