It appears that over the Black Friday shopping period, it wasn’t the Switch or PS5 that was selling like hotcakes, but instead, the less powerful Xbox Series X sibling, the $300 Xbox Series S. This is likely due to a few factors including its price and its availability on retail sites like Amazon.
As reported by Business Insider, this news comes from the Adobe Digital Economy Index which claims to have analyzed over 1 trillion visits to retail sites, and also surveyed over 1,000 retailers on what items were selling better than others. All of this data seemingly points to the big winner of the Black Friday shopping season being the tiny Xbox Series S.
At first, this might seem surprising, but there are a few reasons this smaller Xbox is doing so well. For one thing, it’s actually available at many stores. Right now it’s very hard to get your hands on a $500 PS5 or Xbox Series X. However, the Series S has been available to buy at various stores for days now, including GameStop and Best Buy.
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Another thing helping the Series S is Game Pass. Between Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite, and a large library of older and newer games, the service provides folks with a lot of stuff to play at a low cost. The Series S is all-digital too, so Game Pass is perfect for it.
Finally, the lower price point is definitely helping to sell Xbox Series S consoles. I know a few people who normally wouldn’t buy a console this soon after release or who never buy Xbox machines. However many of them have Xbox Series S consoles. When I ask why, the answer often boils down to “Well, it was cheap and Game Pass seems like a good way to play new games and indie things.”
Interestingly enough, last year Xbox boss Phil Spencer told Kotaku that he expected this, saying: “I think, over the generation, our expectation would be that price really matters and that you would see the Series S sell more.”