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This likely has nothing to do with the ongoing brand problems.
Microsoft have increasingly been threatening massive price hikes because of "tariffs". Costco doesn't want to deal with an expensive but also volatile item.
If Sony and Nintendo start doing the same (rather than baking in expected tariff prices when they launch a new SKU), expect stores to drop them too.
You see the things is that the contacts for Costco are complicated AF. I use to work with Costco as a buyer of our stuff and they work at least a year ahead of what SKUs they are going for. They also have to do all the contacts about discounts and rebates and special program offers.
Not only that they also have a threshold that they need to sell before they even pay the vendor.
They held at least $1.5m from us and we didn't get paid until May.
Costco and Amazon are complicated as hell to work with.
My friend's dad owns a business (trade work, not even selling products) that has contracts with both Costco and Amazon and said the same thing. For Amazon at least, he can't send proposals or bills - everything is done through an Amazon vendor portal. And he gets paid every time he crosses a threshold, not per job.
When you're that big, you can just make everyone follow your rules.
Exactly and their portals are a fuckin disaster.
I gotta make connections work with pretty much any retailer you can name. And yeah when the biggies say jump you gotta say how high.
That being said, Costco isn't so bad. But then I don't deal with the contract stuff. Amazon does indeed suck. Costco is a bit old school but I'd rather that than dealing with Amazon's shitty AWS APIs.
Sony already raised the prices of playstations in the US, citing tariffs as the reason. They raised them before Microsoft announced they were raising the price of xboxes. I don't pay a lot of attention to Nintendo, but I recall the price of the Switch 1 also went up just before the Switch 2 came out.
Aren't tariffs hitting across the board on electronics? Costco is still selling computers, phones, televisions, and other consoles. Seems like this is very much a branding thing.
Depends not only on today's date, but subject to hourly change. At least the fascism is logical if you want to take total power, but the business decisions coming out of the White House are ludicrous.
Business is an art, not a science. Unfortunately, this is the kind of art they do:
Not sure what you mean. Sony already is. Costco can choose to absorb those costs just as easily as they expect MS and Sony to do.
Not to the degree MS is expected to.
The next generation is going to be a complete shitshow. But right now? Signs are that the PS5 will stay mostly stable whereas the xbox is going to get a head start on said shitshow.
This makes sense. Xbox is a very fragmented brand. What is "Xbox?" They just made this big deal about how it's a tablet, or it's a PC, or it's a Steam Deck competitor, or it's a game store with a subscription library, or it's a game streaming platform. And that's before you even get to the fact that there are currently two separate consoles with two different feature sets. If you want to carry "Xbox" as a brick and mortar retailer, you're either going to have to devote a lot of floor space to it, or you're going to have to be okay with the fact that a lot of people are going to come to your store wanting the ROG Ally but you only have the Series S.
Contrast that with the Switch 2. Aside from clearing out backstock, Nintendo has one active platform. Every game currently in print runs on it. If you want to carry Nintendo stuff, you can fit a pretty substantial display (especially in Costco's terms) on a single pallet.
I think it's smart of them to keep all gaming products under the XBOX brand. I suspect the next XBOX (if there is one at all) will be just like the Steam Deck, just a PC in a suit, booting into the XBOX PC app, with an optional Windows desktop.
The game subscription is XBOX GamePass and the cloud service is Xbox Cloud. Simple enough.
I know it may be confusing but it's a transition that's long overdue. The console market as a whole is losing market share to PCs, so why not just make a PC that works like a console? And anyone can optionally buy their own hardware and use that as an XBOX.
Your completely right. They are already headed down this path and, in all honesty, have been for years. The Xbox handheld that was rumored has been axed and they basically chose to work with Asus on the Xbox Ally. The future Xbox console is rumored to be essentially a pc with xbox software. My money is the Xbox Ally is a testbed for the software for next gen Xbox (if a true standalone console is to be made).
Even 5 years ago, when working for them, the goal is to get Microsoft service on multiple platforms. The services (365, Azure, etc.)across Microsoft are what makes the company money, not products. They make more money selling Windows license to 3rd parties than the Surface product line. Their goal is to get you using their Xbox platform on whatever device you want to. As long as you're a subscriber, they honestly don't give 2 shits on what device you use.
I think it's smart of them to keep all gaming products under the XBOX brand.
I don't have any issues with that, I just think that fragmenting the brand across so many different SKUs makes it tough if you're a retailer.
I suspect the next XBOX (if there is one at all) will be just like the Steam Deck, just a PC in a suit, booting into the XBOX PC app, with an optional Windows desktop.
That's more or less what the Xbox already is, just without the Windows desktop. In fact, that's pretty much what the original pitch for the first Xbox was. Obviously they don't bother with the desktop environment or the print spooler or whatever, but "PC in a suit" is basically the way they do everything. And the Switch is Nintendo's "Android tablet in a suit." I think PlayStation is still on a bespoke kernel, but I'm not sure.
The game subscription is XBOX GamePass and the cloud service is Xbox Cloud. Simple enough.
Is it simple, though? You boot up your Xbox (app) to connect to Xbox (Cloud) and play a game on Xbox (GamePass) with your friends on Xbox (Live)? That's simple?
If they were all bundled, that would be one thing. But you have to buy all of those elements individually, and there are probably different tiers of each, and it might be doable, but I guarantee you that I'd prefer not to think through it all.
I know it may be confusing but it's a transition that's long overdue. The console market as a whole is losing market share to PCs, so why not just make a PC that works like a console?
That would be pretty nice, and since Valve has already done the market research on that, it seems like an easy win for Microsoft. But then again, the "PC in a trenchcoat" is what they've nominally been doing this whole time, so who knows if the "Windows living room box" is ever going to happen.
And anyone can optionally buy their own hardware and use that as an XBOX.
I doubt they'll ever truly give users that freedom. OEMs (like ROG) sure, but I kinda doubt they're going to let people just put the Xbox app on whatever hardware they bought.
Xbox is nothing like Windows?
Not visually, but under the hood it is Windows. Windows 2000 in the case of the Xbox and Xbox 360, Windows 8 (and later Windows 10) in the case of the Xbox One, One X & S, and Series X & S. Kernels, drivers, APIs, etc. are all shared with the Windows codebase.
That's like saying Android is Linux "under the hood". No. They share almost nothing.
Very much not true. Accounts from the development team call the dev process "fork and run;" meaning, they made a fork of the operating system. Yes, it diverged over time, but part of the reason that a Windows port of an Xbox game is so much easier is that they're fundamentally the same OS.
And Android is Linux under the hood. They've committed code back to the Linux branch and maintained alignment with the LTS kernel since the start, and even the Linux Foundation calls Android a distro.
At this point it's better to drop consoles altogether. This current generation's been such a disappointment that I'd rather buy a Steam Deck that gives you way more freedom of choice with your gaming library and hardware.
Of the 10 or so costcos Ive visited over the last 20 years ive rarely found one that stocked game consoles. This is southern California. A pretty big market