> "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs,
That was true historically but is no longer the case. Even last gen manufacturing costs didn't go down as much as they used to. This current gen they actually increased multiple times.
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And they have hiked the prices of the current gen very late in the cycle to reflect component costs.
The cheapest xbox should cost 129. Instead it is $399. That is how consoles work. It gets cheaper, the back catalog grows and now you have a mass market item that ideally could source games from anywhere.
Consoles losing physical media and not allowing 3rd party app stores, or gasp, the ability to run user programs is going to kill the consoles. Expensive and marginal future utility.
Exactly, it seems their only way to make money is charging for online play which used to be $5/m and now $10/m for Game Pass Essential. Now that their high console prices aren't getting new players, the only play is to squeeze the existing ones and increasing the cost to play online.
They actually tried this a few months back when Game Pass Ultimate went from $20/m to $30/m. I cancelled my sub and went to essential. Then Asha backtracks and reduces it to $22/m and people are like wow, she will save Xbox. No, it just shows me they probably saw so much churn, especially from long-time subs, that they backtracked.
I've always thought it was borderline crazy that Xbox charged a monthly fee and I never had an Xbox for that reason. It always made me wonder how many people they failed to bring into their ecosystem for that reason.
As far as I understand - that fee is not mandatory.
To play online, you do need to pay them. But for local games, no fees after buying the game.
Cheapest will be 499 dollars from August 1st.