Xbox Series X25 Limited Edition Costs as Much as a PS5 Pro

The Xbox Series X25 Limited Edition will sell for €899.99 in France and the rest of Europe, with an estimated $899.99 in the United States. The figure comes from billbil-kun, the leaker who publishes through the French site Dealabs, and he puts the release on Friday 27 November 2026. That date is Black Friday.

The price matches a PS5 Pro in Europe, a console with double the storage and no disc drive. A closer comparison is the standard 1TB Series X with a drive, which went to €799.99 in early August after Microsoft's latest increase, up from €649.99. The anniversary model asks €100 more than that. Nothing has leaked for the UK, where a PS5 Pro costs £789.99 and the disc-drive Series X sits at £669.99, so a similar gap would land the X25 somewhere near £770.

What the extra €100 buys is a case you can see through. The X25 uses a translucent green shell modelled on the original 2001 Xbox, with the internal components visible and the logos lit in the same colour. The Xbox Wireless Controller X25 Special Edition ships in the box with transparent rear panels and a clear battery cover that leaves the old logo on show. Underneath, nothing has changed: a 1TB SSD and the same performance as any other Series X. Microsoft revealed both at the Xbox Games Showcase in June without prices, and the controller's own pricing and preorder details are expected during gamescom.

No Xbox sold at scale has had a semi-transparent shell before, and Microsoft plans to keep this one scarce: limited quantities, select markets, and a launch window it split between the two products, with the controller arriving in October and the console in November. Official pricing, regional availability and preorder details are still unannounced, and Microsoft has not commented on the leak.

Anniversary hardware has been cheaper than this. Sony charged €50 over the standard model for the PS5 Digital Edition 30th Anniversary, and that bundle came without a disc drive. Microsoft has doubled the premium in a year when its consoles already cost more than they did in June. This is the best an Xbox has looked since 2001, and I want one on my shelf.

Source: Xbox

Xbox hardware has gone up three times in 14 months. In the latest round, from 1 August, 512GB consoles went up $100 and 1TB models $150, pushing the Series X to $799.99 and the digital version to $749.99, with the 2TB model phased out. In the UK the Series S moved from £300 to £430 and the disc-drive Series X from £500 to £670. Microsoft blames memory and storage prices, which it says have climbed more than 2.5 times, and the shortage comes from AI datacentre demand for the same components. Asha Sharma has said the squeeze is not over.

"we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027"

— Asha Sharma

She has tied that forecast to the pricing and availability of Project Helix, and Microsoft is now weighing up fundamentally different ways of selling consoles because of it. Sony raised PS5 prices in the same period.

The anniversary console arrives after a restructuring that has already cost 1,600 people their jobs, with another 1,600 to follow by next summer. Compulsion Games is now listed on Steam as the publisher of South of Midnight, with its link to Xbox Game Studios gone, and Double Fine cut 23 staff during its own separation. Four studios left the company outright, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are in talks with prospective owners, and Arkane Lyon is being lined up for a sale rather than a closure. Protests over the layoffs are still being organised at Bethesda. Xbox content and services revenue fell 10% year over year in the quarter to 30 June, the one gaming line in a $90 billion Microsoft quarter that went backwards. Satya Nadella framed the year as a reset rather than a retreat and told analysts he expects the business back in growth during fiscal 2027.

"We are making the necessary decisions required across our content portfolio, platform, and operations"

— Satya Nadella

Blizzard results made it the top-performing studio inside Xbox for FY26, its third highest year for top-line revenue, carried by Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred and the strongest Overwatch quarter since 2022. Microsoft is widening backward compatibility so that original Xbox titles run on PC from October, with Xbox 360 games reaching PC, handhelds and Project Helix between 2027 and 2028, and developers deciding the price and Game Pass status of each one. Asha Sharma has refused to rule out exclusive games for Xbox, while declining to give a timeline or confirm that any decision has been taken.

Xbox brings 25 games to gamescom from 24 to 30 August with a 25th anniversary FanFest attached, including playable builds of Fable, the Gears of War: E-Day campaign, Minecraft Dungeons II, Stranger Than Heaven, Metro 2039 and the 6v6 mode of Modern Warfare 4. The X25 controller's price should surface at the show. The console's preorder date has not leaked yet, and billbil-kun says he will publish it as soon as he gets it.

Black Friday also falls nine days after GTA 6 reaches PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on 19 November. Anyone shopping for a console that week will have spent the previous one playing Rockstar's game on hardware they already own, and Microsoft will be selling a green box against that. I own a PS5 and no Xbox, which makes €899.99 impossible for me to justify and has not stopped me looking at the photos twice a day since June. My guess is the limited run sells out anyway.

Read also, a fresh GTA 6 leak has surfaced technical data pulled from Xbox Series X development tools, covering lighting caching, shader structures and water rendering, after hackers claimed a breach of Rockstar's India division. More than 6.2 billion bytes of uncompressed data turned up in the material, along with an unreleased screenshot from an April build.