TheXbox Series S was an incredible deal. You could get a current-era Xbox console for $300 – usually less, thanks to how often it was on sale. For anyone gaming on a budget, anXbox Series Sand a subscription to Game Pass would run you less than $400 upfront and you’d be able to play a good number of the most recent releases without breaking the bank.
Now thatGame Pass prices have done nothing but go up, Microsoft decided that it was finally time for the Xbox Series S to follow suit. Raising the price of both products, however, has completely destroyed their value.
It Was Easy To Recommend The Xbox Series S
It’s easy to understand why the Series S was a runaway success for Xbox,outselling the more powerful and more expensive Xbox Series Xfor several financial quarters. It was cheap and although its specs weren’t particularly impressive, some people don’t care about native 4K resolution and playing games at 60 frames per second if letting go of those things means that they’ll be able to afford a console.
The Series S appealed to anyone gaming on a budget, but also to casual gamers who didn’t want to commit to spending $500 on a console they might only use a few times a month while gaming with friends.
When asked about a good gaming console for new gamers before the Series S, I would usually exclusively recommend theNintendo Switchthanks to its $300 price tag and solid library of titles, but once it launched, the Series S jumped to the top of my recommendation list thanks to its value.
The Pitch For The Series S Has Dissolved
With Microsoft’s new prices for its hardware, the Xbox Series S now costs $380 for the 512GB model and $430 for the 1TB version. With tax, you won’t be able to get the Series S –justthe Series S, without any games – for less than $400. The console is still priced far below the Series X which now costs $600, but if you’re paying over $400 for a console, you’d expect its specs to be far better than what the Series S offers.
The Series S is an underpowered machinethat struggles with more and more games every year as they become more demanding. For a $300 price tag, the specs were fine enough in 2020, but five years later, the Series S has not aged well and is certainly not worthmorethan it was worth at the start of the generation.
Priced at $400, there is no reason to recommend the Series S. If you’re willing to spend $400 on a console, it’s much more worth your investment to continue saving an extra $100 or so and pick up a base model PS5.The price of the PS5 is still subject to change(we should expect it to increase following the price increase to all Xbox hardware), but there are plenty of deals where the PS5 costs significantly less than full price. Currently, there’s a PS5 Slim bundled with a copy of Astro Bot listed on Walmart for just $402 which is a far better deal than what the Series S is offering for a similarly all-digital console.
The Value Of Game Pass
While the value of the Series S has gone down in time while its price has gone up, another part of what’s made its value drop even lower isthe rising cost of Game Pass. When it launched, the Series S was often described as a ‘Game Pass Machine’ – a console that proves the worth of Game Pass. For less than $400 you could play first-party games likeForza Horizon 5andHalo Infinite, plus the countless other third-party and indie titles available on the service.
The value of Game Pass has gone down while its price has gone up, too, though. Microsoft’s new price tiering that vastly restricts the library for anyone not paying the highest price. The $20 per month price of Game Pass Ultimate paired with the Series S’s $400 price tag means that Xbox’s budget-friendly console is no longer budget-friendly.
With the new price of the Series S, I can’t imagine anyone would willingly pick one up over a PS5 or a used Series X. It feels like it’s so rare to see a company completely demolish the value of one of its most popular offerings, but we’ve seen Xbox do that several times over the years. Game Pass has steadily stopped being described as the “best deal in gaming” as Xbox has continually burned its fanbase bylaunching underwhelming titlesandshutting down some of its best studios.
It’s possible that Microsoft eventually course-corrects at some point down the road by lowering the price of the Series S again, but that feels unlikely. The Series S was a great experiment that showed how successful a budget-friendly console could be, but I’d wager that the experiment is over and Microsoft is going to go back to a single console at launch whenever it has new hardware to announce.It’ll certainly save developers a big headache, at the very least.
Xbox Series S
Launched in 2020 along with the more powerful Xbox Series X console, the Series S is the full-digital version of Microsoft’s premier gaming platform.
