Microsoft’s recent moves to get more revenue out of its Xbox division have been no secret, with the company having not only raised the prices of its Xbox Series X/S consoles in the US, but also the prices of its Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions. A new report indicates that the company has also raised the prices of its current-generation Xbox development kits. According to The Verge, the dev kit will be getting a 33 percent price hike, going from $1,500 to $2,000.
In a statement released to developers as spotted by The Verge, Microsoft said that this price hike is a result of adjustments that the company has had to make in light of current macroeconomic developments. Aside from this statement, the company hasn’t yet made any public announcement about this decision.
“The adjustment reflects macroeconomic developments,” said the company in its statement to Xbox developers. “We remain committed to providing high-quality tools and support for your development efforts.” While the prices have likely been raised in response to the US tariffs, the report has noted that developers all over the world, including teams in Europe, are also subject to these new prices.
For the sake of context, console development kits have always been quite a bit more expensive than the consoles that consumers usually get to buy. This is because, in order to help with the development of games on the platforms, the development kit also include additional hardware and software tools. The dev kit for the Xbox Series X/S, for example, has 40 GB of RAM compared to the 16 GB found in the Xbox Series X.
The hardware powering development kits tend to be much more powerful than actual consoles, since developers often have to test their games out with assets and code that hasn’t yet been fully optimised. To help with this, the current-gen Xbox dev kit also has more compute cores, as well as a suite of debugging tools to help developers find issues with their software.
It is also worth noting that independent developers often have the option to lease development kits from Microsoft rather than buying them outright. The leasing options tend to be quite a bit more affordable than the price tag of the system, and allows smaller teams to make and release their games on Xbox consoles. Development kits are often bought by larger studios with bigger budgets, since they often tend to require multiple systems on which to test out various builds of their games across different parts of the development process.
The Xbox Series X/S price hikes went into effect in the US earlier this month, and saw the cheapest current-gen Xbox – the Xbox Series S – now priced at $399.99 up from $379.99. The most expensive one, on the other hand, is the Xbox Series X 2 TB Galaxy Black Edition, which now costs $799.99, up from $729.99. As for other hardware, Microsoft recently teamed up with Asus to launch the ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X handhelds, which are priced at $599.99 and $999.99 respectively.
