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Xbox Owners have been held over a barrel when it comes to storage solutions
UPDATE 2: Western Digital has now officially released their SSD’s. You can get a 500 GB for $79.99 and a 1 TB for $149.99. These prices are at full retail and could drop further if and when a sale happens.
UPDATE: Seagate has just announced a permanent price drop for their SSD’s ahead of the Western Digital release. These prices are now even lower than the speculated Western Digital prices. This is fantastic news as we are seeing the benefits of competition already. The new Seagate SSD prices are $89.99 for 512mb, $149.99 for 1 TB, and $279.99 for 2 TB. Let’s see if Western Digital responds by coming in even lower. Any future sales will also bring these prices into even more reasonable price points.
I had two competing thoughts when Microsoft first revealed that they were partnering with Seagate to release a proprietary storage solution for the Xbox Series consoles. On the one hand, it seemed really convenient for the consumer to have a fast and easy storage solution that plugged directly into your console. It was small, unobtrusive, and efficient and I loved that aspect of the Xbox storage solution. On the other hand, anything proprietary often means “very expensive.” With no direct competition, Seagate and Microsoft could charge any price and have little reason ever to lower it.
Well, here we are nearly three years after the launch of the Xbox Series console and its expandable SSD, and while there are a few more Xbox Storage options available, including a $399.99 2 TB and $139.99 512 MB, the prices are still absurdly high, and video game sizes have not gotten any smaller, leaving many Xbox Series owners unsatisfied with the current state of the storage situation.
Finally, it looks like third-party vendors are able to give Seagate a little competition. Western Digital is set to release a 1TB SSD compatible with the Xbox Series S and X consoles. This comes from a leak of Best Buy’s website that has been reported by several outlets, showing an image and price for a Western Digital SSD retailing at $179.99, which is $40 cheaper than the current 1TB SSD offered by Seagate.
Western Digital entering into the Xbox SSD game is fantastic news because this will hopefully transfer to some more competitive prices for Xbox owners who are looking or an SSD. The high cost of SSD storage expansion has been a growing point of contention for many Xbox users, especially when compared to the increasingly more affordable options available for the PlayStation 5. If other manufacturers decide to release their own storage solutions on top of Western Digital, we could begin to see some competitive prices that are a lot closer to the current standard of SSD storage solutions.
Xbox Gamers are already seeing better prices but a little more patience will probably yield better SSD deals
Just a day or two after this leak was widely shared across the internet, Seagate has already launched a sale on their 512 MB expansion card, as tweeted by Xbox’s Major Nelson.
Sales are already showing up for Xbox SSDs.
I think this is an early sign that the Western Digital SSD is indeed going to hit retailers in the near future, and Seagate will probably have to lower their hefty retail prices to stay competitive. I’d caution Xbox gamers to hold out a little longer and let this pricing battle rage on for a bit. Perhaps we will get deeper sales or discounts once both products are in the wild and people start buying one over the other.
If you are in desperate need of storage now, though, and you don’t particularly want to hold out any longer for an SSD, this preemptive salvo from Seagate is an okay deal to jump on right now to give some relief. I myself will be waiting longer in hopes of getting a 1TB for something closer to the industry standard.
The simplicity of the Xbox Series SSD expansion storage is really nice. I do love that all we have to do is slide the SSD in and out of the console when needed. That said, the price that players have had to pay to get their hands on the extra storage is not at all worth the convenience. It makes absolutely no financial sense for the consumer that the storage could potentially cost as much as the entire console they bought, but that is the option that has been presented to Xbox gamers.
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