There’s nothing new, at this point, about opining that video game console prices are getting pretty high lately. Big numbers have been in the conversation since well before this April, when Nintendo shocked gamers by announcing that the Switch 2 would be retailing at a felt-hefty-at-the-time $450. Which doesn’t make it any less wild to see Microsoft step into the handheld console market with an offering more than twice that price, announcing that its new ROG Xbox Ally systems will retail at $599.99 for a basic model, and a big ol’ $999.99 for the more advanced X version.
As the slightly weird name suggests, the ROG Xbox Ally is actually a new model of hardware manufacturer Asus’ earlier handheld, the Asus ROG Ally, and is designed to fill the same basic spot in the gaming ecosystem: A handheld PC with built-in controllers, capable of playing the titles in a user’s existing Xbox game library. (As well as those available through Microsoft’s subscription-based Xbox Game Pass.) In that sense, it’s less a competitor for the Switch 2—which still runs its own specifically designed software—than for something like Valve’s Steam Deck handheld, which allow PC users to access existing titles without being chained to their desks. Even so, though, that thousand-buck asking price is steep: While recent offerings from dedicated hardware companies Lenovo and MSI run at similar price points, you can get a top-of-the-line Steam Deck for $650 new—to say nothing of buying a boring old earthbound Xbox Series X, which currently retails for $550.
Microsoft rolled out the price points just a few weeks before the consoles are set to go on sale, in late October. (Previously, the company had done some hemming and hawing about the problems of macro-economics, which is to say, how badly they wanted to get screwed on tariffs.) The drop-a-grand-on-it X version of the Ally will feature more advanced hardware, a better processor, and a bigger battery, and both versions will come shipped with a special version of Windows 11 that lets the consoles boot up without giving huge amounts of their brains over to running the operating system. Pre-orders for both versions of consoles are now open, if you’re, like, made of money.
[via The Hollywood Reporter]
