4 drawbacks you should know before buying an Xbox Series X

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This has been a pretty grim console generation for Microsoft, between hard-to-swallow Game Pass price hikes, upsetting studio closures and all those Halo Infinite "Craig the Brute" memes. You can expect an Xbox Series X to last years if you look after it properly, but should you even buy one in the first place?

Considering it's never been more expensive to pick up a Series X, the console is easily overpowered by Sony's PS5 Pro, and you can play pretty much every Xbox game of the current generation on PC, it doesn't look like a great time to buy an Xbox Series X. Let's get into the negative factors you need to consider before taking the plunge on Microsoft's console.

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That really is an Xbox Series X dressed in the official Starfield console wrap Microsoft released back in 2023. And yes, I was basically using it as a glorified Christmas prop by this point (please don't block your console's vents with decorations). Suffice it to say, my Xbox Series X was no longer worth it to me, so I promptly sold it.

The market forces that have seen Xbox Series X prices skyrocket lately make it much less financially appealing than the box I bought back in 2020. So much of the reasoning behind console costs is down to global firms' desire to quench the insatiable memory and storage thirst of AI data centers. 

When the Xbox Series X first shipped for $499 in November 2020, it looked like a relatively good value. Here was a small, 4K/60 fps capable box that could do ray tracing. Compared to the disastrous launch of its DRM-obsessed Xbox One predecessor that cost $500 back in 2013, the Series X looked destined to become a sales success.

Skip forward to 2026, and average Xbox Series X prices range anywhere from $725-$900 depending on storage configurations. The 1TB disc-based model generally sells for around $799, while the digital-only "Robot White" is  $750. 

For those with plenty of disposable cash, the investment could still be worth it. The Xbox Series X is the second most powerful console on the market, and a terrific gaming machine. Yet in the current financial climate, a 60 percent price increase makes it a much harder sell, especially for aging hardware.

Microsoft

There was a time when Xbox Game Pass represented tremendous value. When it launched in June 2017, it cost $9.99 per month and granted access to a library of over 100 Xbox One games, plus a selection of backward-compatible Xbox 360 titles. The higher-tier Xbox Game Pass Ultimate launched in June 2019, costing $14.99/month. From here, the service started to get less appealing.

After the subscription gradually crept up to a monthly fee of $19.99 by July 2024, Microsoft made the decision to set the price of Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99 starting in October 2025. Following six months at this wild cost, widespread fan backlash forced Microsoft to reduce the monthly Ultimate sub to $22.99, which is its current price.

Other Game Pass tiers don't feel as value-friendly as the original service from almost 10 years ago. The $9.99/month Game Pass Essential is a stripped-down service that offers around 50 games. There's also $14.99 Game Pass Premium, which gives you access to over 200 titles playable across Xbox Series X|S, PCs and cloud devices. However, neither of these include day-one releases; you need Ultimate to play titles like the upcoming Fable reboot on launch day.

The Ultimate tier has gone through even more controversy. For a while, one of its perks was unlimited cloud streaming, which came to a halt once Xbox introduced time limits for game streams. Now Ultimate subscribers are limited to 15 monthly hours of streaming, with even less for the lower tiers and additional hours being available for purchase.

If you play enough, you can still get your money's worth from Game Pass. I'm not going to pay $70 for Forza Horizon 6 when I can experience it with a subscription and jump to something else when I'm not feeling it anymore.

Dave Meikleham for Engadget

For hardcore gamers, there have always been compelling reasons to own a capable Windows gaming PC over an Xbox Series X. That's because a powerful rig is currently the best way to experience Xbox Series X games. 

Forget overpaying for a six-year-old console. Providing you own a decent gaming laptop or PC, you can play over 300 titles with PC Game Pass for just $13.99 per month. This includes day-one Microsoft exclusives like Gears of War: E-Day. The PC and Xbox Game Pass libraries don't match exactly, but you'll almost certainly find something you're interested in playing. Very few games are truly console-exclusive — and for anything not on Xbox, Steam sales are common.

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The PS5 Pro is significantly more powerful than the Xbox Series X on the GPU front. Microsoft's elite box has 12.15 TFLOPS of GPU power compared to PS5 Pro's 16.7 TFLOPS, while they both support ray tracing thanks to their custom AMD RDNA APUs. As for processors, both use AMD Zen 2 chips with 8 cores and 16 threads, with the Pro boasting a slighter higher 3.85 GHz clock speed compared to Series X's 3.8GHz.

So while the PS5 Pro has a clear graphical rendering advantage, allowing the machine to run many games at higher resolutions than the Xbox Series X, there's not much difference between their processors. That means in open-world games that are often CPU-intensive, you don't typically see big FPS bumps from the Pro console.

Speaking of which, GTA VI is causing a PS5 Pro shortage. Folks are paying exorbitant sums on the secondhand market to get the best experience in Rockstar's highly-anticipated title. Used PS5 Pro systems are listed for nearly $1,400 at the time of writing (with the current MSRP being $899).

Will GTA VI look better on PS5 Pro compared to Xbox Series X? Almost certainly, thanks to Sony's PSSR 2.0 (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution), which looks so good in Resident Evil Village. But when it comes to performance, it looks like both consoles will be stuck at 30 fps.