Microsoft Explains Why The Xbox Series Expansion Card Is So Expensive

I only play a game or two at a time, so I don't need much installed regardless. Maybe someday, but no real bother

This price will get lowered with time as seen in the usual YoY flash memory price fall.
Proprietary format enables it to be easily hot swappable by any average joe.

Pretty well signposted cost structure for us board lurkers, but the average mom/pop may get a land if they get a Series S and then 3 months later little jenny/jimmy is looking for one of these.

We should make a drinking game for every time Jason Ronald says "transformative gaming experiences"

Sony said similar things regarding their proprietary storage for the Vita, if memory serves. Not necessarily saying anything as grandiose as that this will doom the Series X, but it didn't go over well due to the costs involved for consumers. I get it; Microsoft wants to market this console as the "most powerful/fastest" of everything, and they've created two tiers (Series X and Series S) for buyers whose financial or technical (mainly their displays) limitations won't allow as much. It's just that proprietary hardware historically tends to rub folks the wrong way.

PS Vita memory cards really comes to mind here.

Key is it's optional. It's not a $100 kinect that drives the console out of the competitive price range.

1TB with the console will be fine, once I finish games I usually delete them. If I need one of these hopefully they’ll be cheaper in the future.

It reminds me of the Vita memory card pricing, but at least I can use an external HDD to store the rest of my games. For me price needs to come down.

It's more expensive than what I thought but I will probably get one eventually I don't know if I will even need one as my gaming will be taken up by one game in the near future.

I want one, but I need to buy a new phone as well. So might leave it until the start of next year. 🙁

Fair to say, I think a lot of us are going to be waiting for this to come down in price. That or we could sell a few kidneys between us?

Must say, I could definitely do with it. Children of Morta is currently so painfully slow to load on console and Android...

By now I'm very used to only playing one or two games at a time, so the 2tb HDD, and 250gb SSD will do me fine

@Grumblevolcano Like Vita cards, really? This is optional and just wait for PS5 825GB SSD prices 😂.

@Medic_Alert @RedShirtRod True, unlike Vita, the next-gen consoles have internal memory. 1TB of next-gen internal memory in 2020 is generous. If you need more you can connect a HDD until the expansion cards are cheaper. Remember, they're selling consoles but not accessories at a loss, that's why these expansion cards seem ridiculously expensive.

People saying its all fine because they will run the Xbox One games on standard hard drives - doesn't that mean they won't get the performance benefits then?

I don't think I could do that especially once we all start getting used to the instant loads on this gen. Bit like my PS3 - as soon as I got the PS4 I couldn't use my PS3 again. It just took too long to load a game instead of the instant pick up and play of the PS4.

I don’t think this is comparable with Sony’s vita card pricing as the Xbox has alternative storage if required on traditional hard drives.

On Vita you could only use their SD cards with no other option...

While i understand all the Vita comparisons, I think this case is vastly different and definitely not apples to apples. The Vita had next to no storage so you absolutely had to buy the cards, here its 100% optional and you can still store everything on a 8tb clunker you can get for the same price. Lots of upset folks about the pricing but I really don't see what the issue is personally.

@Tasuki the money Seagate are probably paying MS for the licensing outweighs that concern I think.

@Tasuki Difference being: This is optional. With the Vita, it was not.

I don’t really think it’s expensive given that all cards right now in that performance level and size are around that price. That said it is expensive compared the consoles pricing. But I expect year prices to go down.

Again there a lot of options for store games, it’s just running them.

@AtlanteanMan yes and no. I don't know if most consumers understand "proprietary versus nonproprietary storage devices." And in the context of these two consoles, because the PS5 version is technically "superior"/faster, it also starts at a higher price for the flash.

But consider the current discussion on PushSquare over the release of the Samsung 980 Pro. It's one of 3 drives that may work with PS5...or should. And we don't know the actual performance on the console with it because any addon drive is separate from the main "12 channel Cernyvision solution". So consumers need to figure out which (scarce for now) mass market PC nvme SSD is compatible with PS5, buy it, pop open the console chassis, and pop it into M2 slot on the mainboard. And most current M2 nvmes aren't compatible. It needs to be v4. Sounds like PC gaming land. It is PC parts. Kinda cool for our kind of forum gamer. Not so cool for Ma Costco buying little Jimmy that console.

Versus XBox where there's a peghook on the shelf next to the XBoxes with an XBox branded box showing "1TB addon hard drive", and you just plug it in the back like a USB stick.

For "gamerz" the proprietary solution is a bit of a groaner. But for the average consumer buying an XSeS or a PS4D, I'd consider the PS5 almost non-user-upgradable, while XBox just has "game cards" like a PS2.

For pricing, I don't know how it will go. It's Seagate, it's proprietary, and I remember the X360 days of overpriced proprietary hard drives (that were actually just regular 2.5" HDDs in a proprietary enclosure.) But that was also easier than upgrading a PS3 where you had to replace the OS drive to upgrade it. Prices were high, and I fear a repeat of that. Though it won't get quite Vita memory bad. I will never know what Sony was thinking with that. It's not like they didn't already have multiple semi-standard memory formats on the market they owned already with Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, and Memory Stick Duo. Why did they need to create a 4th proprietary memory standard used by one device?

360 era xbox was just gouging, and few gamers really needed bigger HDDs, so there wasn't much scale there. Digital hadn't really taken off yet. But that was Donny's XBox, not Phil's.

@StonyKL Very true. But at least you can pick up your old X1 hard drive, plug it in, and run it exactly as it always ran plus all the new performance and graphics improvements. If you want the load speed boost, though, you have to use the SSD. And that will matter to many of us. I'm thinking AC: Origins, Sea of Theieves.....oh gawd those load screens......

@BlueOcean 1TB 980 Pro is $10 more than this, so it's part with Sony upgrade pricing (for now) and easier to use. Although Sony gives you less out of the box (but it's all faster, in theory.) But the 980 pro probably falls in price faster than this proprietary solution will, I'm sure.

@Tasuki Like I said above, though, look at the non-proprietary alternative Sony used....it's kind of a mess. I hate the proprietary idea, but I think there aren't many options here. It's all PCIe. It has to connect to the main IO directly into the memory bus. You can't do USB style connectivity. The only options you have are a proprietary interface like this to make it USB-like, or planting the drive right onto the mainboard like Sony's doing, so it's like upgrading a laptop. But that comes with the confusion of knowing which drives actually work right with the unit.

At least XBox includes the storage in the machine to start. Vita had a different problem. It required buying one just to run the launch games at all. And what they sold was a lot more expensive than the exact same thing in any other format for no apparent reason. You don't need to buy one of these drives, they're an important convenience item, but not essential. You needed to buy the Vita memory, you couldn't even run launch cartridge games without one, and the smallest size you could buy barely held the minimal patch/install data for a handful of games, with no way to store them in bulk storage at all. And it was a handheld....

The price is seriously totally reasonable for several reasons.
1) Very likely most people's minds will change when they see how fast the internal drive is at deleting and saving. The bottleneck likely won't be your internal memory, it'll be your Internet connection. If that's great such as with WIFI6E you likely won't care about deleting and saving because of how fast it IS.

2) By the sound of it neither Microsoft or Seagate are making any profit on these expandables. Microsoft are already selling you a great console at either cost price or loss and giving you incredible affordable Game Pass. You want them to also take a loss on expandable storage you don't strictly need as well?!

3) This expandable at this price is really aimed at pro gamers and streamers who actually need it and will pay for it. It's like the Elite controller. All Microsoft is doing is creating a product niche that didn't exist before.

4) In time Microsoft will probably bring down the cost of expandables. They're creating a market and they'll be keen to expand it, particularly if lower costs means more AZURE usage and more enterprise sales. But my guess is this expandable storage will always cost at least £100 for the next couple of years. So if you don't need it, no reason to complain. If you need it, even if that's just because you have ADHD like I do and patience isn't your strong suit, save up and accept the cost gracefully.

@StonyKL I have. SSD in my PC. Most games I play aren't even on it though because of the limited space. Doesn't bother me one bit.

On top of that you can use a regular SSD for your old games via USB and get blazing fast load times if that is what you're concerned about.

And Samsung have just released a 1TB internal SSD with PCIe 4.0 that offers significantly MORE speed/bandwidth for a fractionally higher price...

Of course that won't fit in the expansion slot but does kind of put it into some perspective. Something that has around 3x the speed costing roughly the same...

Can't wait to see what 3rd Party and non Xbox branded options become available. The Xbox branded Seagate HDD's were a lot more expensive than the exact same ones without the Xbox branding...

@Lionyone "So if you don't need it, no reason to complain. If you need it, even if that's just because you have..."

SQUIRREL!!!

@NEStalgia @Lionyone Great comments. The bottom line is that these expansion cards are priced fairly because this technology is new and expensive (compact and fast SSD card with a heat sink) and they only seem expensive because they're basically giving the internal memory away since these consoles are sold at a loss, for now.

I agree that Microsoft's solution is better because it's much more easier and simpler. It's literally like pushing a GameCube memory card into the slot. On PS5 you have to remove the case and make sure that the PC part SSD that you're buying is compatible or certificated.

@Grumblevolcano

The Vita (I had one) shipped with no memory at all, so you had to buy a memory card. XSX/S comes with an SSD that is bigger than Sony’s infamous SSD. You don’t have to buy this.

I was going to buy one, but they screwed us in the UK with the exchange rate, so now I’m not going to bother.

I’m not paying $280.00 ($60) for no reason at all.

There’s a huge markup on these, I will wait until they come down.

For the first couple years their won’t be that many games I will even buy for the series x,1tb is about 12-15 games

Sure, it may remind some of the Vita, but then the Vita only had 1 GB of internal storage. Buying their proprietary memory cards were virtually mandatory. Even the bundle versions of the Vita still had only 4 GB — hardly anything, especially if you used the Vita to play PS1 JRPGs.

I will buy one when I need it. Hopefully it will have enough stock for easy purchases. I can live with the price.

I'll hold off on buying one until I really need it.

@BlueOcean I'm not going to knock PS5 as I hope in couple of years or so I'll actually own a PS5 as my first ever PlayStation! I'm trusting that the PS5 expandable option will be fairly simple albeit quite different. Sony have been somewhat opaque about it so more will be revealed in time. But yes Xbox SX expandable sounds lightning fast to swap out which is very appealing!

I love the Xbox SX but I'm waiting until they release a model that has a fun game themed design across its glorious box. Hopefully by then I'll have a TV that can make the most of Series X!

@Lionyone Yep I'm in a little hurry because I'm selling my only Xbox console and I need to use Game Pass Ultimate on Series X as soon as possible! 😁

There was this thing that very much required you to buy (multiple) proprietary memory cards if you wanted to save your game. It was called the Sony PlayStation. Despite this, sales wise, it seemed to do pretty ok.

@BlueOcean In that case enjoy it to the full in good health!

That's rough. I got a 2TB nvme drive with a faster speed rating for I believe roughly $30-40 cheaper. That was shortly after the release of the consoles. I get why they did it, but I like the PS5's approach more, even though expandable storage isn't even an option on it yet. The Vita isn't a fair comparison because that only game with like 1GB of storage, so you literally HAD to buy one of the proprietary memory cards if you wanted to have any digital games. One TB is plenty if you only keep what you actually play installed.