Microsoft has revealed the official pricing for a key hardware expansion of its upcoming next-gen gaming system. According to the official blog post, Xbox Series users will have to shell out a mighty $219.99 for the opportunity to upgrade their system’s storage with an additional 1TB Storage Expansion Card.
Next-gen is almost upon us. Both Microsoft and Sony are heavily banking – besides Ray-Tracing – on the new consoles’ high-speed NVMe SSD storage systems. These super-small and crazy-fast storages are a true paradigm shift that will change gaming arguably much more than just faster load times.
The jump to the new technology comes with a penalty though. Namely, price and capacity. While HDDs have long broken the 10TB barrier, SSDs are trailing behind on that front while still costing similarly. That’s why the Xbox Series will feature an internal SSD of 1TB capacity. In an age where one game can easily be larger than 100GB that’s going to be a problem for users who like to have multiple games on the ready.
The Xbox Velocity Architecture is a key innovation of our next generation consoles, delivering unprecedented speed and performance enabling transformative gaming experiences never before possible on console.
Microsoft’s approach to this problem is Storage Expansion Cards. These proprietary cards slot into the Xbox Series consoles just like USB sticks and offer valuable new storage. After leaked listing for these cards surfaced recently, Microsoft has now officially talked about them.
The leaks were true and Microsoft confirmed that a 1TB Storage Expansion Card will cost users $219.99. Xbox’s Jason Ronald explained the high price with the technology being very advanced and thus costing more to produce. Ronald is correct, as is very visible on the PC market where similar specced NVMe SSDs cost about the same.
Still, it’s a pricy upgrade when one considers that it almost costs the same as the entire Xbox Series S console. Thankfully it’s entirely optional.
