Microsoft Defends Xbox One X’s $499 Pricepoint

There’s no denying that the specifications of the Xbox One X are beyond impressive, and they have massively pushed the boundaries for the hardware limits of a home console, even them bringing them on a comparable footing with PC gaming. However, the one point that has been one of debate and contention has been the system’s pricing, with many deeming its $499 price tag to be too costly.

However, Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra, Xbox’s corporate vice president, feels that if Microsoft were to deliver a proper premium console with the kind of specs and capabilities that the Xbox One X boasts of, they couldn’t have possibly done so at a lower price. “This is designed for the premium gamer that wants the absolute best experience,” Ybarra said in an interview with Polygon. “And so compromising any of those then makes that message much harder to communicate to them. We showed them the smallest Xbox we’ve ever created, the most power, the best price per performance you can get anywhere, in this box. That’s what we’re delivering. I think if you start taking away some of those items, people will say, ‘Well, what were your goals?’ And that’s an area that we don’t want that confusion to exist.”

“[At $399], we wouldn’t have been able to usher in 4K to the living room, and that was a design pillar for this box,” Ybarra continued. “There’s lots of goals in the program, from compatibility to everything. But one, let’s really usher in true 4K where developers don’t have to think about, ‘Wow, how do we stretch this and make it really work?’ We needed to deliver that to consumers. They asked us for uncompromised true 4K in the living room. And so we leveraged a lot of PC technology, from the cooling, the power management system that’s in this, to get it this small — while managing acoustics. That was the goal.”

Recently, Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, also said something that pertains to the issue surrounding the One X’s price point. Spencer said that the Xbox One X isn’t for everyone, and targets a very specific audience. You can read all about it here.