The admittedly epic and extremely green Xbox Series X25 special edition console sold out within minutes of being available online Thursday. It’s a great sign for Xbox that fans still love the brand. It’s also a sign that the company needed to do more to protect its limited-edition product from being gobbled up by bots and scalpers.
The $900 limited edition console in its transparent green shell also ships with a special limited edition controller and a copy of Halo: Campaign Evolved. Microsoft previously declared it only planned to ship 25,000 of these consoles, with each console holding its own engraved number. Limiting preorders was bound to cause a buyer stampede. At 10 a.m. ET on Thursday, Xbox pushed preorders live, and within minutes the lot of consoles and controllers had sold out. You can’t find the special edition available at Xbox’s own web store, Best Buy, GameStop, or Amazon. Now, the only place to find the console is on eBay. You already know where this is going.
and you thought $900 was bad 🥲 pic.twitter.com/WPiHSScMpj
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) August 27, 2026
There are dozens of “confirmed presale” listings on eBay selling for an average price of $2,500. One seller is demanding $5,000 for the 25th anniversary special edition Series X. Just to put that price into perspective, a non-limited edition Series X with an optical drive currently costs $800 after recent price hikes.
On Microsoft’s site, the Xbox team limited the special edition consoles to just one per customer, and any preorder was tied to a Microsoft account. However, it’s unclear if other sites like Amazon or Best Buy had any buyer restrictions in place. Xbox had also conducted a special offer to “loyal Xbox fans,” which gave players who are active in the community an opportunity to purchase a console separately.
PlayStation had very similar problems last year with its 30th anniversary edition consoles. Bots and scalpers tore into Sony’s store page and caused outages so severe many buyers couldn’t even click through to the buy page. Scalpers tend to ruin everything, but the limited-edition Xbox sale seems especially egregious.
Gizmodo counted more than 80 listings for a presale Xbox Series X25 on eBay as of reporting time. And that’s just the listings that haven’t been sold yet. Trawling through the recently sold section shows some people have actually bought an ultra-green Xbox for upwards of $2,500. There were even more listings for an $80 limited-edition controller by itself selling for $150 or more. No, we don’t suggest anybody spend more than $2,000 on a limited edition console you can get for $800 without the green accents.
The Series X25 console is set to ship Nov. 13. The controller is supposed to arrive sooner, on Oct. 20. Unless Xbox suddenly decides to produce more, you’ve already missed your shot. The next step is to wait for Microsoft’s 25-year-old gaming brand to share more about its upcoming Project Helix console. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told the BBC her company was putting “affordability” at the front of their minds with the next-gen console. We can guess that Helix will be a little cheaper than $2,500. But with RAM prices the way they are, who knows.
