After raising prices on Xbox consoles and subscriptions, Microsoft is now turning its attention to Xbox developers. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the company is significantly increasing the price of its Xbox Development Kit (XDK) — the custom hardware used by developers to build Xbox games.
The current Xbox dev kit is moving from $1,500 to $2,000, a 33 percent jump in price. “The adjustment reflects macroeconomic developments,” says Microsoft in an announcement to Xbox developers, seen by The Verge. “We remain committed to providing high-quality tools and support for your development efforts.” I asked Microsoft to comment on the price rise, but the company didn’t respond in time for publication.
The price increases to the Xbox dev kit come just a month after Microsoft hiked the price of its Xbox Series X console for the second time this year. The second price increase to the Series X means the console is now $150 more than it was just six months ago.
Microsoft also blamed “changes in the macroeconomic environment” for its latest Xbox console price hike last month, and both the increases to consoles and dev kits, 30 percent and 33 percent respectively, align with the Trump administration’s 30 percent tariff on imports from China. A recent report suggested that Microsoft is pushing to produce more Xbox consoles outside of China, in a clear attempt to reduce the impact of the tariffs.
The short announcement from Microsoft’s Xbox developer relations team makes it clear that this price increase goes into effect immediately. I understand it’s not just impacting US developers, as the price of these development kits is also going up across Europe and elsewhere. That’s likely because those “macroeconomic” conditions extend beyond just US tariffs, with currency fluctuations, production costs, and other elements impacting pricing.
Microsoft’s Xbox dev kit was already expensive because it comes with additional hardware on the inside and out, to let developers build and test Xbox games for both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles. Microsoft has equipped its latest dev kit with 40GB of GDDR6 memory, instead of the 16GB found on the Xbox Series X console. It also has a more compute units enabled, the all-important debugging tools onboard for testing games, and three USB ports at the front. Microsoft also equips its Xbox dev kits with a front panel display and five programmable buttons.