The Budget Xbox Series S Now Costs 499 Euros, and That’s the Good News

The Xbox Series S was supposed to be the console you bought without thinking about it. Cheap, small, good enough, the thing you got your kid or picked up as a second machine for the bedroom. In Europe it now costs €499.99. That's a 43 percent increase on a console that launched as the budget option, and it's the smallest number in this story.

Microsoft told everyone back in June that Xbox prices were going up on August 1st, but it only shared US figures at the time. The European and UK numbers landed when the increase actually took effect, and they're considerably worse than the American ones.

The new numbers

In the EU, the 512GB Series S went from €349.99 to €499.99, and the 1TB version climbed from €399.99 to €599.99. The Series X Digital jumped from €549.99 to €749.99, and the disc-based Series X went from €599.99 to €799.99.

In the UK, the 512GB Series S rose from £299.99 to £429.99 and the 1TB from £349.99 to £519.99. The Series X Digital went from £449.99 to £619.99, and the standard Series X from £499.99 to £669.99.

Boiled down: €200 more for 1TB models and €150 for 512GB in Europe, £170 and £130 respectively in the UK. In the US the same increases were $100 and $150. Microsoft is also discontinuing the 2TB model.

The reason, and how much of it to accept

Microsoft points at memory and storage costs, which it says have risen more than 2.5 times and are expected to stay elevated through 2027. That's the same AI-driven component crunch making your next phone, laptop, and Pixel more expensive, and consoles are unusually exposed because GDDR6 memory is a big share of the bill of materials on a machine sold at thin margins.

So the explanation is real. What makes this land badly is everything around it. Consoles are supposed to get cheaper as they age. This is the second year running that Microsoft has raised Xbox prices, and for the first time in the history of the business, every console manufacturer is pushing prices up during the stretch of a generation when cuts normally arrive.

It also arrives against a rough backdrop for the division. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told staff in July that roughly 3,200 positions would go through fiscal 2027, with 1,600 cut that day, and wrote plainly that the business today is not healthy. Four studios left the first-party portfolio in the same announcement.

What this means if you were going to buy one

At €799.99, the disc-based Series X is a genuinely hard sell against a PS5 that sits meaningfully below it in most European markets, and against a gaming PC that plays nearly everything without locking you into one store. The Series S makes more sense on paper as an entry point, but a 43 percent increase erodes the entire reason that machine exists.

If you already own an Xbox, nothing changes except the cost of replacing it when it dies, which is the scenario most of these sales will now come from. If you were shopping, check used and refurbished stock, and check whether retailers are still honoring old pricing on units they bought at the old cost.

The uncomfortable read: Microsoft is a company that can afford to eat component costs on hardware and make it back on Game Pass and software. Choosing not to, in the same season it cut a fifth of the division's headcount, says something about how much of a hardware future Xbox is planning for.