€200 more for an Xbox Series X: Microsoft's memory bill lands on European buyers

Microsoft’s August 1 price rise landed, and the European figures are worse than the American ones. A 1TB Xbox Series X now costs €799.99, up €200. The 512GB Series S went from €349.99 to €499.99, a 43% jump on the cheapest console Microsoft sells.

Microsoft disclosed the US numbers back on June 25 and held the UK and European figures until the day the increase took effect, which is why this reads as new news six weeks after the announcement. The reason it matters beyond one console is that consoles are the first product category where a component shortage has to be passed straight through, and the pass-through is now large enough to reorder the market. In the UK, an Xbox Series X costs about £100 more than a PlayStation 5 with a disc drive. That gap didn’t exist in July. Every console generation is decided partly on price parity, and Microsoft just conceded it in the two regions where it was already behind Sony on installed base.

What the new prices are

The published figures, confirmed by Video Games Chronicle and Engadget:

Two things fall out of that table. The percentage damage is worst at the bottom of the range, because €150 on a €349.99 machine is a bigger share than €200 on a €599.99 one. And the 2TB Series X isn’t getting a new price at all. Microsoft is discontinuing it. That tells you where storage costs went.

For anyone converting: the entry Series S at €499.99 is roughly $575 at current rates, for the console that shipped as the budget option. This is also the second increase inside a year. The October 2025 round moved US prices $20 to $70, and The Verge notes this one is an order of magnitude larger.

Why consoles take it worse

Microsoft’s own explanation is unusually direct about the mechanics, and it’s the part worth quoting. The company wrote that “console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027.”

That second half is the forecast nobody wanted. It says Microsoft has priced in another year of increases and expects to still be behind.

The structural point Microsoft makes alongside it explains why gaming hardware moved before anything else. Unlike phones, computers and speakers, the company says, “consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.” A phone maker facing a DRAM spike can absorb it out of margin or quietly cut a spec. A console maker selling below cost has no margin to eat, so the bill arrives at retail almost immediately.

Microsoft paired the increase with financing: buy-now-pay-later options, 0% APR for up to 12 months, trade-ins, and Certified Refurbished consoles at up to $100 off list. Useful, and also an admission that the sticker price has moved past what the audience will pay outright.

Xbox isn’t alone. Engadget reports Sony and Nintendo have announced their own increases, and the same NAND and memory crunch is now squeezing MacBook Air supply, per TechCrunch. We covered the underlying arithmetic last week: a gigabyte of DRAM went from $2.80 to $12 as high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators outbid everything else on the same production lines.

What this means for you

If you were going to buy an Xbox, you already missed the good price, and waiting looks worse than buying. Microsoft’s own forecast of another doubling by fall 2027 means the next revision is more likely up than down, and a discontinued 2TB SKU is what precedes a thinner lineup rather than a cheaper one. Refurbished and trade-in routes are the only paths that got better this week.

The wider read: if a console can absorb a 43% increase and stay on shelves, every device with a memory bill in it is repriceable, and PC builders are exposed worst because they buy the modules directly instead of getting them bundled into a subsidized box. Valve’s Steam Machine already launched at $1,049 into this market, and that number was set before the latest spike. Watch what Sony charges for a PS5 revision. If Sony holds its price while Microsoft goes up £170, the gap becomes the story of this console generation’s final years.