Considering Sony's recently announced price hike for the PS5 (in whatever soil lies outside the U.S.), the question remained whether Microsoft would follow suit. Sony's claimed reasons for the price hike, stemming from rising inflation and increased production costs, are certainly general and actual enough that they could be true for any business. Yet it seems that Microsoft is either not operating in the same global landscape as Sony - or perhaps the company is merely more willing to shoulder the additional costs so as not to increase pricing.

Speaking with Windows Central, Microsoft clarified that "We are constantly evaluating our business to offer our fans great gaming options. Our Xbox Series S suggested retail price remains at $299 (£250, €300) the Xbox Series X is $499 (£450, €500)." Which is actually a great thing, especially considering that gamers around the world are still underserved in the amount of available PS5 and Xbox consoles that have been made available to buy. The Xbox stock situation has improved faster than that of the PS5, but there are still millions of gamers who haven't been able to get their hands on one or the other - and those still waiting for a PS5 console for no fault of their own are now dealing with increased pricing on an almost 2-year-old console.Both consoles feature a similar hardware configuration - they're built around an AMD-designed SoC with 8 Zen-2 cores and RDNA2-based graphics, 1 TB of SSD memory, 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM, as well as a BluRay unit. Interestingly, the console remaining at the same price (the Xbox Series X) features a larger SoC die than the PS5, due to it having a bigger GPU footprint. This, in turn, affects costs - unless Microsoft managed to ink out better prices from parts providers, chances are that the PS5 is cheaper to produce than its Xbox Serie X counterpart.

Microsoft is riding its Game Pass success, which has become a steady stream of income. Even so, Xbox consoles have generally sold less than the PS5 worldwide, with 16 million units for Microsoft's consoles compared to the PS5's 22 million units. It remains to be seen whether the increase in pricing will do anything to change the balance.