With the recent launch of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X handheld gaming PCs, Xbox president Sarah Bond has revealed just what went into the decisions behind the pricing of both devices. For the sake of context, the ROG Xbox Ally is priced at $599.99, while the more powerful ROG Xbox Ally X is priced at the much higher point of $999.99.
In an interview with Variety, Bond revealed that quite a few things were taken into consideration when deciding on the prices, including input from manufacturing partner Asus.
“We looked at, how do we create multiple options for people? And it really was Asus, because this is their hardware,” Bond explained. “That is all of their insight into the market, into the feature set, into what people want, to determine the ultimate prices of the devices.”
Bond also went on to note that the high prices of both of the devices, especially when compared to competing devices like the Steam Deck, didn’t really affect early sales of the handhelds in an adverse way. Speaking about opening up pre-orders last month, Bond said that “the reaction was overwhelming demand for the [ROG Xbox Ally X].”
“We sold out on the Xbox Store. We sold really quickly at a number of other places around the world,” she said. “I feel really good about the value that we’re giving gamers for the price, based off the reception to the hardware.”
She has referred to this positive early response to the ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X as “a real confirmation of something that we know and have been working towards for a really long time, which is gaming should act like all entertainment: it should be something you can have with you anywhere. You should be able to play any game you want with anyone you want on any device.”
In the same interview, Bond also spoke about the future of Xbox at Microsoft, and how the company still wants to continue making things, including next-gen gaming hardware. She said that Microsoft is in the process of designing and prototyping its next hardware outing, which will feature an AMD-developed chip powering it under the hood.
“We are 100% looking at making things in the future,” said Bond. “We have our next-gen hardware in development. We’ve been looking at prototyping, designing. We have a partnership we’ve announced with AMD around it, so that is coming. What we saw here was an opportunity to innovate in a new way and to bring gamers another choice, in addition to our next-gen hardware. We are always listening to what players and creators want. When there is demand for innovation, we’re going to build it.”
In the meantime, the Asus ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X were launched worldwide just last week. The Xbox Ally runs on an AMD Ryzen Z2A CPU, has 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB storage, while the Xbox Ally X has an AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme CPU, 24 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage. For more details, here is everything you need to know about the two handhelds.
