It comes ahead of an August 1 price rise for the Series X from £449.99 to around £563.99
Just a few weeks into her tenure as XBOX CEO, Asha Sharma slashed the cost of Game Pass — the Netflix-like subscription that unlocks access to a rotating catalogue of blockbuster titles like Call of Duty, DOOM, Halo, Forza Horizon, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Spyro — after complaining that it had become too expensive for players.
But the newly appointed Chief Executive is unable to stem the spiralling cost of components around the world. The explosion in Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools has led to a dramatic expansion of data centres worldwide, gobbling up memory supplies faster than manufacturers can make them.
With silicon supplies dwindling, Apple has been forced to increase prices across its iPads and Mac, including the most affordable £599 MacBook Neo. Microsoft has increased the starting price of its Surface laptops and desktop PCs, while Sony has also raised the cost of its PlayStation 5 consoles twice during this generation.
Looking ahead to the follow-up to the Series X and Series S consoles, which CEO Asha Sharma has confirmed is currently being developed under the codename Project Helix, the Microsoft gaming brand is seeking solutions to prevent such price increases in the future.
Asha Sharma has shielded the hardware teams from the brunt of the 3,200 job cuts announced across the XBOX — stylised in all-capitals following a survey of players by the new Chief Executive — to ensure there's enough talent to create the next generation of console.
Sources inside the company told Windows Central that hardware engineers were looking at "aggressive innovation" to "reduce the total cost of material" rather than "scaling back the console's scope or delaying its timeline".
It comes less than a month after XBOX CEO Asha Sharma was interviewed on-stage at a Fortune event, where she outlined the scale of the problem: "Look, on hardware, we are in a crisis right now. The entire industry is."
"There’s a shortage of memory and storage, and the costs are exponential. They are usually at this point in the generation, about 50% of the cost, and we’re seeing they’re up 2.75x, they’re up 50% since they started; they’re going to be up effectively 7.5x.
The Chief Executive, who cut her teeth at Messenger with Facebook parent company Meta, said that she's directed teams to explore "radically different business models" to make its next console affordable. She added: "I think that we will continue to look at new business models. I think [that is] what is needed for console rather than just the most premium, high-performance console in the world.
“I think we’ve reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend on a console generation, and so I think we will start to see radically different business models that we never expected start to come into orbit later this year.”
XBOX CEO Asha Sharma has confirmed that Project Helix is in development and will "lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games", while Vice President of Next Generation at XBOX, Jason Ronald has confirmed that chip manufacturer AMD is working on the console with Microsoft to achieve "an order of magnitude leap in ray tracing performance" and improved efficiency.
There's no confirmation of when exactly we'll see the successor to the XBOX Series X and Series S make its debut, although there will be a 25th anniversary edition of the former hitting store shelves before the end of the year. This is something that Sony has previously done with its PlayStation 5 console.
