By Nelson Schneider - 05/11/25 at 04:35 PM CT
Oh dear, it looks like Trump’s idiotic tariffs (import taxes that he still doesn’t understand how they work) and trade war are already hitting gamers in the wallet. Hot on the heels of Sony’s overpriced PS5 Pro announcement and Nintendo announcing an egregious new price point for the Switch 2 and $80 first-party Switch 2 games, this past week, Microsoft rolled out price hikes on… OLD hardware that already exists!
It seems that the Xbox Division doesn’t want to maintain its status as Loss Leader, and with new tariffs on all of their made-in-China junk, they’re jacking up prices across the board, as IGN has helpfully laid-out in list format. We’re seeing jumps of anywhere from $10-20 on controllers and $80-100 on Xboxen themselves as the 9th Generation grinds to a close, whereas we used to see consoles and peripherals DROP by that much in the same general time frame, often accompanied by re-releases of “Greatest Hits” reprints of high-selling physical games.
I’ve seen some folks taking the super-cynical angle that Microsoft was just waiting for an excuse (like Trump’s tariffs) to make Xbox hardware less appealing, as a way to make Gamepass look more appealing. Essentially, the idea is that the Xbox Division created the problem of more expensive hardware to sell the solution of Gamepass and “Everything is an Xbox.” I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but considering how corporate behavior has been insidious and manipulative for a century already, it’s actually possible that Microsoft might just do this as a way to deflect blame from themselves to outside market forces beyond their control.
On one hand, these price hikes makes the future of Xbox branded hardware seem even dicier than all of the previous turmoil going on within the division. The Xbox Series could very well be the end of the line for Xbox consoles. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Xbox controllers and the Xinput standard were revolutionary it helping PC gaming evolve past using a typing apparatus to interface with games. On the third hand, I (and the rest of the MJ Crew) have been experiencing a LOT of build quality issues with first-party Xbox peripherals, to the point where I’m the last hold-out who still uses official Xbox controllers and headsets for PC gaming. (My reason for this is because no other peripheral manufacturer makes a controller-attached mini-keyboard/chatpad that works with third-party Xbox controllers).
Consoles were already on their last legs, with Xbox coming in last place 2 generations in a row, Sony’s powerhouse PlayStation 5 losing to Nintendo’s phone-powered hybrid Switch, and Valve’s Steam Deck eating everyone’s lunch by embracing extreme backward compatibility. Will Console Gaming manage to hang on, or will the 10th Gen become an absolute bloodbath?
