Phil Spencer: Console prices will not decrease

During previous console generations, it wasn't uncommon for prices to drop significantly, so that after a few years you could buy an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 for less than half of the launch price.

Despite the fact that several European territories are currently offering reasonable discounts on the PlayStation 5, there has been little in the way of price reductions on the latest generation of consoles, which have often been in short supply on store shelves.

Now Xbox boss Phil Spencer tells Eurogamer that we shouldn't expect the consoles to drop significantly in price at any point in the future.

"The prices aren't coming down. We see it now, and that's why we did Xbox Series S," Spencer says. "For us, thinking about where our hardware is going and reaching more customers, price point is important. But you're not going to be able to start with a console that's $500 thinking it's gonna get to 200 bucks. That won't happen. Because the core components that you use - you're used to Moore's Law shooting up and to the right - but your components... you can't buy them anymore as a hardware maker because nobody's making that kind of RAM or other components. It's not the way it used to be where you could take a spec and then ride it out over 10 years and ride the price points down. It's why you see console pricing relatively flat."

Due to rising inflation and high demand for components, both Microsoft and Sony have chosen to increase the suggested retail price of their respective consoles since the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 were released in November 2020.