But now they are charging so much for the smaller Xbox in the South American country that it costs more than the PlayStation 5!?

A Brazilian publication, FlowGames, interviewed Phil Spencer, where he defends the price increase by saying that Xbox products have been sold at the same price for three years, which minimizes profits and therefore the business is not “sustainable”. Of course, it is irrelevant that due to many taxes in the country, you have to pay a lot for modern hardware, and that is why Brazil became famous as a kind of pirate stronghold in the 1990s. In other words, the hardware was too expensive (unless it was made locally), and that’s why even the PS2 was successful in the 2010s.

But let’s be specific about the extent of the price increase: the price of the Xbox Series S has been raised from 2649 Brazilian Real to 3599. That’s a 35% increase (the last time we saw something like this was when the annual subscription price for all three tiers of PlayStation Plus went up in September…). That means it went from $538 to $731 (in USD prices, mind you!). However, you can get the PlayStation 5 for less than that. This makes Microsoft’s console look less like a bargain…

Spencer said that local markets cannot be directly compared due to different government decisions, consumer base, and market competitiveness. (Which is why the price increase seems ridiculous, Phil!) He said that the Xbox series price increase has not affected the company’s profit margin and may be “the smallest in the world,” and said that Microsoft’s strategy is for the long term, not for financial gain: “And even with the price we have now, after the increase, this is for us, in terms of what we can see from the sales of the Series S [in Brazil], probably the smallest margin in the world of what we get, of the revenue that we managed to get. For me, the most important thing is that the pricing is done in a way that makes us viable here for the long term. I have to make sure that my commitment to the consumers here is to run a good business,” Spencer said, adding that he respects local customers.

That doesn’t look like respect…

Source: WCCFTech