Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra doesn’t like what he’s hearing about the next Xbox console costing somewhere in the range of $1,200 to $1,800, as was recently reported.
In case you hadn’t heard, yes, I’m afraid I bring you even more bad news about the games console market. A recent report from Fortune claims Microsoft is projecting internally that its next home console will “cost consumers between $1,200 and $1,800,” assuming Xbox doesn’t subsidize some of that cost and take a potential financial loss on hardware sales. Even amid an unprecedented increase in component costs driven by global memory shortages, $1,800 is stretching the limits of the most cynical predictions for the price of next-gen hardware. Let’s remember quickly that less than six years ago, the PS5 and Xbox Series X released for $500.
Voicing his astonishment at the possibility on Twitter, Ybarra urges Xbox against considering a next-gen line of consoles at such an exorbitant cost to consumers.
“I find this very hard to believe,” he says. “A ‘console’ is a mass-audience device and you need great games and a low entry price (IMO $399 to $499). A console at the prices rumored below will never sell meaningful units to be of any value vs. alternatives. Zero.
“I wouldn’t release it at all,” says Ybarra.
I find this very hard to believe. A “console” is a mass-audience device and you need great games and a low entry price (IMO $399 to $499). A console at the prices rumored below will never sell meaningful units to be of any value vs. alternatives. Zero. I wouldn’t release it at all. Stick with PS5 Pro/Series X until prices normalize. The capabilities of those boxes are both fine for 99% of the audience. No one is screaming “I need a more powerful console” right now and I believe tons of optimization can and is happening on those platforms (see Xbox’s AMD announcement on FSR 4.1 today – which is fantastic).October 20, 2026
Not to belabor the point, but consumers particularly in the US right now are already fielding increased prices on everything from fuel to housing to insurance to ground beef, and entertainment as an expense is increasingly being squeezed from budgets. Anecdotally, I can tell you that if Xbox released a $1,200 console today, I would simply dust off my Xbox Series X and tell new Xbox to get bent. And that’s exactly what Ybarra suggests console manufacturers do for now:
“Stick with PS5 Pro/Series X until prices normalize. The capabilities of those boxes are both fine for 99% of the audience,” he says. “No one is screaming ‘I need a more powerful console’ right now and I believe tons of optimization can and is happening on those platforms.” As an example of these optimizations, Ybarra points to Xbox’s recent announcement that its machine-learning upscaler FSR 4.1 is coming to Xbox Series X and S.
I’m interested to see how Xbox navigates this situation. Amid new CEO Asha Sharma’s big and layoff-heavy reset, what the company does with its next big machine will answer a ton of questions about how it plans to position itself against competitors Sony and Nintendo in the next generation of hardware. Of course, Sony and Nintendo are in similar predicaments, although Nintendo to a lesser degree as it just released the Switch 2 last year.
