This is the first console generation ever in which hardware that’s nearly 6 years old costs way more than it did at launch. And Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has finally stated what we all already know—that gaming is getting too damn expensive, and that the next generation of consoles needs to stop focusing on performance alone.
“We have reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend on a console generation,” Sharma said in an interview with Fortune. The Xbox CEO is likely referring to the next-gen Project Helix, proposed as a “premium” offering that will combine PC and Xbox gaming under one roof. “We will start to see radically different business models that we never expected start to come into orbit later this year,” Sharma added.
Multiple hardware leaks suggest that Project Helix could be one of the most powerful consoles available—30% more powerful, by pure 4K framerates, than the rumored PlayStation 6, according to the mostly reliable leaker Moore’s Law is Dead. Any such console will cost a ton, and the ongoing RAM price apocalypse driven by the push for AI data centers will make it even less affordable over time. Expensive consoles drive losses, as evidenced by flagging sales of Sony’s PlayStation 5 after recent price hikes.
“There is material work to do to make sure [Helix] is available to the people who want to play,” Sharma said, adding that the company is looking at “what is needed for console, rather than just the most premium, high-performance console in the world.”
These comments came a few days after Sharma wrapped the blowout 2026 Xbox Showcase. Xbox now has a slick, translucent green limited-edition Xbox Series X on the way—but it hasn’t told us much that device will cost when it hits store shelves this fall.
The fresh blood in the high echelons at Xbox is coming to terms with the current gaming landscape. Last month, Sharma installed industry analyst Matthew Ball, the writer of the annual State of the Video Game Industry report (the latest was full of truly dire tidings for the industry), as the new leader of Xbox strategy. Ball didn’t mince words about the state of Xbox in an interview that The Game Business published this week.
“I was underestimating how bad it was in February,” he said, referring to an earlier talk that took place shortly after the publication of his 2026 industry report. “It is bad for players, it is bad for platforms…the crisis is not yet getting better.”
This concerning inside-baseball look at Xbox should be a wake-up call for all console gamers and beyond. Ball, a former EA executive, said that the company is “working hard to rethink what the console model can look like, not in an exclusionary way, but in an additive way.”
Previous Xbox leadership imagined that we might abandon consoles altogether. Former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer doubled down on game subscriptions through Game Pass, kicking the Series S and Series X to the curb. Ball said that after Xbox raised the price of Game Pass’s Ultimate tier to $30 per month, it lost “millions of subscribers.” Sharma similarly said the price hikes led to “a decay” in the company’s user base. The new leadership, unsurprisingly, brought subscriptions back down to $23 a month. To achieve that price, the company promised it would stop offering Call of Duty titles as day-one downloads.
Xbox now knows there’s a ceiling to how much gamers are willing to pay for both all-you-can-eat game subscriptions and consoles. If there’s one thing we can glean from these comments, it’s that console competition soon won’t revolve around power anymore. It’ll revolve around price.
