Microsoft has slowly lifted the veil on the Xbox Series X over the past few months, meaning that some of the final questions we have about the next-gen system are in terms of price and launch date. Despite an official price having yet to be announced by Microsoft, it seems as though internally, Microsoft hasn’t even settled on a final retail value for the platform and might be waiting to see what the competition in Sony and the PS5 will be doing.
Speaking to IGN in the latest episode of Podcast Unlocked, Xbox Head Phil Spencer talked about the price of the Xbox Series X and acknowledged that the team internally has a lot of plans for what cost it wants to release the console at. “You have to set a price target at the beginning for yourselves and then you kind of roll in as you see the competition come in and you start to do your go-to-market planning,” Spencer explained. “I feel good about the price that we’re going to be able to get to. I feel good about the price and the performance capabilities that we have with Series X.”
Despite having a rough estimate in mind of the price that the Xbox team is trying to hit with Series X, Spencer also made clear that this cost could be flexible. “We’re getting incredible support from Microsoft. Satya Nadella, the CEO, my boss, Amy Hood, the CFO, they’re very linked in to what our plans are,” he said. “We’re going to make sure that we stay agile on our pricing and that we have a good plan going into launch.”
Spencer went on to talk about how vital it is to release at a competitive price point compared to others in the industry, but also mentioned that the Xbox Series X’s larger ecosystem might prove to be a selling point for many. If the PS5 and Xbox Series X are roughly the same price, for instance, then features and services such as Xbox Game Pass, backward compatibility, and smart delivery could prove to win consumers over in their purchasing decisions, according to Spencer.
As for the actual launch of the Xbox Series X this year, Spencer says the COVID-19 pandemic currently hasn’t changed Microsoft’s plan to release the platform in 2020. Furthermore, any games that were expected to release alongside the platform at launch, even that of Halo Infinite, if they were to somehow get delayed, it still wouldn’t affect the release date of the Xbox Series X.
For now, expectations are still that the Xbox Series X will arrive later this year in the Holiday 2020 window. While plans could certainly change depending on what happens throughout the remainder of the year, we’ll just have to wait and see what continues to come about as we move forward.
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