Xbox Series X price and pre-order bundles when can we

The next generation of consoles is drawing steadily closer and Microsoft is starting to really stoke the fires of the hype beast’s furnace with more and more information. But as for the official Xbox Series X price and pre-order deals to expect, Bill Gate’s gaming honchos are playing the waiting game, like their rivals, Sony.

Thankfully, thanks to rumors, leaks and our own technical breakdown of the confirmed hardware and Xbox Series X specs, we’ve been able to get a rough idea of what to expect (you might want to break the news gently to your bank balance). We can also give you an idea of when the console will land and what Xbox Series X bundles you should keep an eye out for.

We shouldn’t have to wait much longer for locked-down answers. E3 2020 has been canceled thanks to coronavirus, but it’s being replaced by an Xbox digital event in June. A recent online showcase event unveiled a bunch of brand new titles with trailers during an Inside Xbox presentation. And while light on actual gameplay footage, we’re still super excited to get our hands on (eventually), the likes of Dirt 5 (now with added Troy Baker and Nolan North), Bright Memory Infinite and the Silent Hill-esque, The Medium. We’re going to need extra gloves and hand sanitizer for Scorn though.

We’re really hoping the Xbox Series X stock is actually readily available at launch; there are rumblings that the PS5 release plans and stock have been impacted by Coronavirus, so it’s possible that Xbox Series X will also suffer from a limited release too.

For everything else we know about the next-gen console’s price, read on – and don’t forget to visit our detailed guide to Xbox Series X once you’re done.

What about Xbox Series X bundles and deals?

Halo Infinite is expected to launch alongside the Xbox Series X in the fall of this year, so we’re pretty sure you can rely on Master Chief’s latest mission to arrive with the new Xbox Series X pre-orders. Dirt 5 is another title that will be available from launch too. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 might squeeze in at some point during 2020 as well. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will be landing around the same time too. Otherwise, it’s still a little early to know what titles we’ll be playing at launch. Take a look at our roundup of upcoming Xbox Series X games for a glimpse of what else could be on the way and don’t forget to tune into our very own Future Games Show in June for some new footage and dev interviews.

Don’t expect reduced software in Xbox Series X bundles at first, though – we don’t usually see big discounts in the early days of a new console. Instead, we’d hope to at least see retailers offer bigger price cuts on bundled extras like Xbox Live Gold deals or maybe a few free months of gaming via an Xbox Game Pass deal.

That’s not to say it won’t happen later of course. Microsoft did eventually get around to regularly releasing different bespoke Xbox One deals and Xbox One X bundles with games included in-box – albeit as digital downloads instead of discs. We’ll hopefully know more about any potential Xbox Series X bundles by the time summer arrives.

Where can I place an Xbox Series X pre-order?

Today? Nowhere. We’ve seen a few super speculative retailers (that we’d never even heard of before) appear in news stories offering up PS5 or Xbox Series X pre-orders for a massive, made up placeholder price. But in reality, there are none out there yet at all, so hold onto your cash.

Once Xbox Series X pre-orders do go live, we expect them be available at all the usual outlets. If stock is limited at all, we’d expect the bigger-brand stores, ones with the largest reach, to get dibs on stock though.

So in the US, expect Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and GameStop to feature for sure. Amazon aside, you’ll be able to order online or in-store at those stores. With the ongoing Coronavirus situation devastating many retailers though, we expect some GameStop stores to arguably not still be around come the holiday shopping season, so we’d reserve your Xbox Series X at a different store in all honesty to avoid disappointment on launch day.

Microsoft has online stores in countries around the world and sells the current line of Xbox One consoles along with accessories, so expect to see Xbox Series X pre-orders here too. It will be the last place to find any sort of discount though.

Much like GameStop over in the States, UK shoppers might find local Game stores hanging on for dear life by launch too, so we’re a bit conflicted ordering on its online store too. Game does still have considerable sway in the industry though and is often one of the few stores to grab Switch stock when it’s sold out elsewhere, so it’s too soon to count it out for sure.

Otherwise in the UK, you’re spoiled for choice with reliable online retailers. Amazon will be a huge player and super fast delivery via Amazon Prime will be a popular choice. Electronics specialists Currys, has been rocking some great console deals lately and of course, you’ll have the option of picking up your online order in-store if you don’t want to risk the post being a little slow. Elsewhere, we’d expect stores like ShopTo, TheGameCollection, AO.com and Base.com to hopefully get Xbox Series X pre-order stock too.

It will be worth keeping an eye on John Lewis too as all of its electronics come with a free 2-year guarantee at no extra cost, which could actually make it the best deal of the lot. However, its enthusiasm for console stock varies wildly throughout the year. It’s hard to not see the store wanting a piece of the next-gen rush though.

Over in Australia, Amazon is growing all the time and it could be a big contender. You’ll want to keep an eye on EB Games and JB Hi-Fi too.

What’s inside Xbox Series X?

Much like the 4K-ready Xbox One X before it, the specs inside the Xbox Series X are impressive. The tech powering this next-gen console gives us a good idea of what the Xbox Series X price may be. More specifically, we now know that the Xbox Series X specs feature eight Zen 2 CPU cores, 12 teraflops of graphical power, a 1TB NVMe SSD, and 16GB of DDR6 RAM. Wondering what all that means? For starters, it’ll be a smoother and more detailed experience than you’ve ever seen on a console before. Additionally, your games will have shockingly fast loading times. We’re talking seconds instead of minutes, here. That’s a huge deal.

The AMD ZEN 2 computer processing unit and a Navi chipset that’s apparently 10% better than the already powerful GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card. This will allow the new Xbox to pull off real-time ray tracing, a more realistic lighting system that’s usually the preserve of high-end PCs. What’s more, according to Microsoft, the Series X’s blisteringly fast RAM will “usher in resolution and framerates we’ve never seen before.” We’ll be seeing a machine that natively supports up to 8K resolution and 120 frames-per-second.

With such an impressive spec sheet, we suspect the console will cost a pretty penny. It’s jam-packed with high-end tech that puts it on par with the very best gaming PCs, after all. But don’t panic. Comments made in an interview with The Verge by Xbox head Phil Spencer suggest that the Xbox Series X pre-order price won’t break the bank. Indeed, he mentions that “a learning from the Xbox One generation is we will not be out of position on power or price”. In other words, it should be very competitive with the PS5 pre-order price. Or even less expensive, if we’re lucky.

So what if we tried to build something like a PC gaming rig to match this spec? How much would that hurt our wallets? ‘Brutally’ is the answer. Ignoring (for a second) that Microsoft is effectively promising to launch its new console with an SSD that outperforms current solid-state drives for PC, as that’s impossible to anticipate. Instead, we’ll draw your attention to the fact that the hard drive inside of Xbox Series X is based on a high-speed NVMe drive. If we were to look at something like the Samsung SSD 970 Pro as a reference point, the 1TB version comes in at £299/$350 alone. Now, given that Series X needs to be future-proofed for installing and reading 4K and possibly 8K assets – not to mention equipped to deal with an increasing push towards a digital-first ecosystem, thanks to services like Xbox Game Pass – you’re staring down the barrel of a potentially hefty bill. Factor in a need to mitigate the strain of ever-increasing install sizes and we are immediately looking at a premium rig… and that’s before we factor in any other integral components or the particular shade of metallic-black Microsoft decides to spray the box in.

This doesn’t mean we’ll be shelling out thousands on an Xbox Series X pre-order though. Microsoft will be working to cut costs where it can, looking to make its manufacturing process as cost and resource-efficient as possible. We hope the manage it. Even as SSD prices slowly begin to tumble on the road to late 2020, the fact remains that PCI-E-based NVMe drives – which Series X’s ‘next-generation’ SSD is modeled after – aren’t so quick to fall, coming with a 20-50 percent premium over their slower, SATA-based brethren.

And what about the graphics? Well, we know that Xbox Series X comes equipped with an SoC, a custom system-on-chip platform that integrates the CPU and GPU together. As mentioned above, it is essentially a purpose-built AMD Navi chip in an effort to support new initiatives like hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing. While AMD is yet to reveal its latest Navi chips and Ryzen 3000 CPU range, we are probably looking at something like an RTX 2080 or a Radeon VII as a standard-bearer for comparison. Factor in native 4K resolutions at 60 frames-per second (not to mention potentially future-proofed for 8K resolutions, and 120Hz refresh rates) and you’re looking at a GPU that would cost no less than $800 for a PC build equivalent. Then you’ve got the AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPU core built with Radeon RDNA architecture and… look, it gets real expensive, real fast.

Again, does all of this mean that the Xbox Series X price is going to cost upwards of $1000? Of course not. While these individual components may be unfathomably expensive when looked at in isolation, the truth is that Microsoft is still trying to finalize the details. As Microsoft attempts to work out how many of these integrated CPU/GPU chips it can manufacture, there’s a good chance that elements of the chip’s design may be disabled as the kinks in the chain are worked out, helping to bring that initial cost down. The same was true of the Xbox One, which also featured a SoC design, that saw some of its processor cores initially disabled to mitigate the early problems in the manufacturing process.

Ultimately, the more aggressive Microsoft wants to make this process, the more complex it wants to make the internals of the system at launch, the more expensive the Xbox Series X deals will be initially – growing cheaper over time as the manufacturing process improves and Microsoft, in collaboration with partners such as AMD, work out how to streamline the entire process.

The Xbox Series X price will be high, of that there is no doubt, but it isn’t going to push the $1000 barrier. It’s just way too much of a leap to expect gamers to fork out for, even if $1000 flagship mobile phones are increasingly the norm from Apple and Samsung.

Given the kind of custom, bleeding-edge technology and components being packed inside Xbox Series X, believing that the system will come in at less that $499/£450 would seem like a foolish endeavor. Microsoft is yet to properly detail its launch plans, but Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s Partner Director of Program Management, told our sister site Windows Central that: “We understand what reasonable price points are for a console and kind of what customers expect about that. At the same time to you, we are innovating we are pushing the boundaries of some of this… We’re not sharing any details on price, or, you know, more detailed specs at this point. But I will say that we’re very confident in what we’re building, something that will set a new bar for expectations of console gaming.” Read into that what you will.

How will the Xbox Series X price compare with older Microsoft consoles?

Looking at Microsoft’s track record with pricing, there’s a pretty good chance that Xbox Series X pre-order price will come in at just over $499. That was the launch price for both the Xbox One in 2013 and its more powerful predecessor the Xbox One X in 2016. While the original Xbox launched at $299 in 2001 and the Xbox 360 hit shelves at $399, adjusted for inflation those numbers can scale up to $399 and $499, respectively. $500 is the Xbox sweet spot. And seeing as price conversions from the US don’t work out great for folks in the UK, $500, may well translate to around £450-£500 for Xbox Series X pre-order deals.

Xbox Series X deals will still be expensive – but backward-compatible accessories and games will save you money

Right now, a $499–$599 price point would seem likely and the same goes for its closest rival, as we laid out in our overview of PS5 vs Xbox Series X. The leap to this new generation isn’t going to be cheap, but that’s the price of true evolution. The sting of the Xbox Series X price could well be softened by virtue of Microsoft putting so much stock into supporting Xbox Series X backward compatibility.

Think about it, you pay $499 for a console but that only escalates when you factor in a couple of launch games purpose-built to sell the system – engineered to showcase all of the new flourishes and features that the new console brings – along with new controllers, subscriptions, and whatever other extras the publishers are pushing. With Xbox Series X, all of your existing Xbox One peripherals and services are forwards compatible; achievements, progression, controllers, service subscriptions, Xbox One headsets and other accessories move forward to Series X, while the console will also let you play existing games via both the optical disc drive, digital download, or through Game Pass. You could be able to save a couple of hundred dollars right off the bat.

With the Xbox Series X launch date set for late 2020, it surely won’t be long before Microsoft is ready to offer up new details and give us a solid understanding of what the Xbox Series X price will really be. Of course, when the company does we will be sure to update this page, so keep your eyes locked to GamesRadar+ for any and all next-gen details as they happen.

If you want to check out what you’ll be playing next-gen, then head on over to our guide to the best upcoming Xbox Series X games. Or if you want to keep things current-gen we also have a list of upcoming Xbox One games. We also try to break down just how important will ray tracing be for Sony’s PS5 and Xbox Series X in the next generation.

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