If you haven’t been tracking the release of the Xbox Series X 25th Anniversary Edition console this week, the experience has been frustrating for virtually everyone except scalpers. Limited to just 25,000 units globally, severe stock shortages were guaranteed from the jump. But with an already steep $899 retail price tag, secondary market conditions spiraled out of control the moment official online listings emptied. Outrage quickly flooded online gaming spaces, forcing the official Xbox subreddit to lock new individual posts and channel the wave of community complaints into a single dedicated megathread.
Methodology
To measure the actual damage on the secondary market, we analyzed data from 60 of the most recent completed eBay transactions for verified console listings. To preserve data integrity, listings were filtered to only include established sellers with at least 50 feedback reviews to weed out throwaway accounts and potential scam listings. Initial launch-day outlier sales were excluded to eliminate unverified or canceled orders, and regional shipping estimates were omitted to keep figures standard across every transaction.
The image below shows an example of a sale that was excluded from our dataset due to the seller’s minimal feedback history and how early in the launch window the transaction took place.
The Data
What we found in the sales data is that the average price sold sits at $2,132.77, representing a massive 137% markup over the official $899 MSRP and pricing the console at more than 2.3 times its retail value. While the mean price hovers around $2,133, the median sale price lands slightly higher at $2,200.00. The single most common transaction price was exactly $2,500.00, which accounted for 16.7% of all completed sales. Across the entire sample, completed prices spanned from a low of $1,556.87 up to a peak of $2,899.99.
The dataset reveals clear pricing bands among buyers and sellers. Nearly half of all sales fell into a core market tier between $2,000 and $2,399, heavily clustered around the $2,200 to $2,250 range. Another quarter of transactions reached the premium tier of $2,400 to $2,900, largely driven by fixed-price Buy-It-Now listings. Mid-low range sales between $1,700 and $1,999 made up one-fifth of the market and mostly comprised active auctions closing at odd dollar amounts. Finally, a floor tier of sales under $1,700 represented just one-tenth of transactions, bottoming out at $1,556.87 from motivated sellers or quick-turnaround auctions.
The Prices Are Dropping
While resellers continue to command steep premiums, transaction history shows that the market is slowly compressing after the initial launch rush. Comparing the older half of our 60-unit sample to the most recent sales shows a gradual downward trajectory. The older half of the sample averaged $2,154.05, whereas the ten most recent sales dropped to an average of $2,047.22, marking a decrease of nearly $107. While prices remain more than double retail value, buyers who held off during launch pre-order day are seeing asking prices slowly drift toward the $2,000 mark as immediate launch window hype subsides. With only 25,000 units in existence, secondary market prices are unlikely to ever get close to a price point near MSRP, but the trend suggests the $2,500 peak is beginning to soft-cap.