2025 passed, but last year was the worst year on the British market for Xbox. The game industry journalist Christopher Dring said on X that the sales of Xbox hosts dropped by 40% last year compared to 2024.
Of course, the most important reason is that Microsoft has gradually shifted its focus from its own hardware and traditional mainframe games to other platforms, and last year was an accelerated year, when some of its original monopolistic games, such as the War Machine series and the Extreme Race: Horizon series, were launched on the PS platform.
In recent days, Xbox President Sarah Bond has directly indicated that the concept of monopolistic games is out of date. Between April and July, six of the 10 games before PS5 sales came from Microsoft.
The cross-platform, coupled with the continuous push of the XGP, seems to make the player less interested in purchasing the mainframe. However, not only Xbox, but PS5 also lost 19% in the UK.
And in the United States, except for the United Kingdom, the game host performed poorly during the Thanksgiving season in November 2025, and according to Circana, US hardware and software sales were the worst recorded since November.
The reason for the overall market downturn was not just across the platform, but more directly: prices, PS5 and Xbox had gone through a wonderful situation of higher prices, and the average sale price of a brand-new mainframe had reached $439, an increase of 11 per cent over the same period the previous year, perhaps the real reason for the decline.
And it’s not going to get any easier in 2026, and it could get worse — it’s because of the price of memory. The large demand for memory generated by the AI server led to the transfer of all manufacturers to the production of HBM memory, leaving the DDR memory strips in high stock.
Although large plants will have relatively long price-guarantee contracts in procurement, this does not mean that the stock will eventually run out of time, and it has become doubtful, as is the case in the three households, that the mainframe will again raise prices this year.
In addition, there are numerous reports that both PS and XBOX consider delaying the release of the next generation of hosts due to memory prices, which could be extended to 2028.
The impact of memory prices is comprehensive, the computer mainframe is a disaster-prone area, the memory strips in PC have doubled, and prices are even higher than the graphic cards, and the price increases are likely to come from the graphic cards (VRAM) and SSD, and the Korean media News has reported that NVIDIA should adjust the price of the card this year. Even an estimate of the original sale price of $1,999 RTX 5090 could soar to $5,000.