Fingers have been pointed regarding the ROG Xbox Ally X’s beefy £800 / $1000 price tag. Xbox, whose name is on the handheld, have pointed to collaborators Asus as having spearheaded that decision, with president Sarah Bond saying that it came down to the hardware company’s assessment of what’d be acceptable to charge.
“We looked at, how do we create multiple options for people? And it really was Asus, because this is their hardware,” Bond told Variety. “That is all of their insight into the market, into the feature set, into what people want, to determine the ultimate prices of the devices.”
“I feel really good about the value that we’re giving gamers for the price, based off the reception to the hardware,” she added.
As our James acknowledged in his Xbox Ally X review, the handheld’s price certainly doesn’t leave it a no brainer bargain, but isn’t massively out of step with what other handhelds go for:
The fact that it costs £800 (or a crisp $1000 in the US) doesn’t help, but then the MSI Claw 8 AI+ already proved that it can be worth splashing out if framerates and practicality are up to premium standards. The ROG Xbox Ally X sometimes makes the cut, though is just as often outpolished or outlasted by its peers, and even suffers from outright faults that undermine Asus and Microsoft’s genuinely good UX work.
I’m having a little trouble believing that Xbox, whose CEO Phil Spencer made no secret of how much he pines for the handhelds prior to pulling the trigger on an Xbox-branded one, didn’t have any say in the figure which was stuck on the box. If you’re putting your company’s name on the thing and want to minimise the potential that has to backfire, surely the price is one of the elements on your radar to discuss thoroughly, even if you think you’re likely going to be happy trusting in Asus’ cited mountains of wisdom.
Then again, an exec earning massive wads of cash to make these sorts of calls and deals I am not. Plus, there’s the much-discussed issue of US tarrifs and their potential impact on the cost of goods like the like the Xbox Ally X, which seemed to be alluded to via the phrase “time to figure the macroeconomic impact to pricing” when Asus and Microsoft opted to push back announcing the handheld’s price by a couple of months.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
