Microsoft's $899 Xbox X25 Restock Sold Out in Seconds, and GameStop Is Charging $4,950

By CriticalPixel · 2026-11-13

Microsoft put the 25th Anniversary Xbox Series X back on sale this week and the restock was gone in seconds, which is now the standard outcome for anything green and limited. The uglier story is what happened next. GameStop listed the same console at $4,950, roughly five and a half times the price Microsoft set, and shoppers could still add it to a cart. Xbox has not commented on any of it.

What the X25 actually is

The X25 is a genuinely nice piece of hardware. Translucent OG green shell, 1TB SSD with a disc drive, a matching see through controller, an engraved number on the chassis, and Halo: Campaign Evolved in the box. The official Xbox Series X page lists it at $899.99, which makes it the most expensive Series X on the shelf: the 1TB Carbon Black is $799.99, the 2TB Galaxy Black is $799.99, and the all digital Robot White is $749.99. You are paying a $100 premium for plastic you can see through, a serial number, and a pack in game. That is the entire pitch, and it worked.

Translucent green Xbox Series X25 Limited Edition console with matching wireless controller

GameStop put a $4,950 sticker on a $899 console

GameStop is supposed to be the retailer that holds the manufacturer's price. On Friday it did the opposite. Kotaku added the X25 to a cart and the total came to $5,311.25 once $7.99 in shipping and $353.26 in tax landed on top of the $4,950 listing. The night before, that same listing sat at $1,500, which means somebody looked at the resale market, saw what flippers were asking, and decided to match it. Walmart went the other direction and pulled the console from its store entirely.

Here is the part that should bother you more than the number. GameStop is not a scalper with six bot accounts and a PO box. It is a public company with a purchasing department, and it is using dynamic pricing to charge more than five times MSRP on hardware it buys at wholesale. Kotaku has documented the same pattern with Pokemon cards for months, and the company has clearly decided the resale margin is worth more than the customer relationship. When the store becomes the aftermarket, suggested retail price stops meaning anything. It becomes a suggestion the retailer is free to ignore once demand shows up.

Xbox Series X25 Limited Edition shown next to standard black and white Series X models

The resale market is the product now

The secondhand market is not much better, but it is at least honest about what it is. Kotaku found eBay listings clustered around $1,700 with a high of $2,395.95, while GameSpot reports sales averaging closer to $2,500. That gap is the whole story. People are not only asking these prices, they are paying them, which means the scarcity is the product. Microsoft built a collector's item, priced it at premium console money, shipped a short run, and let the aftermarket handle the marketing. The console is a lottery ticket that happens to boot Halo.

Fans have stopped being polite

The reaction has been the angriest aimed at Xbox hardware in years. Under Kotaku's post, one player compared the price to a used car and another called a $5,000 GameStop chargeback the easiest decision a bank would ever process. The sharpest reply was aimed at Microsoft directly: why keep partnering with a retailer that treats MSRP like a suggestion? There is no good answer. Xbox spent the year arguing that hardware is not the future while selling the priciest Series X on its own store page, and the people who wanted to actually open one got beaten by bots and then invited to pay a flipper premium by the store that was supposed to sell it to them.

Rear ports and ventilation of the translucent green Xbox Series X25 Limited Edition

Nintendo and Sony already built the fix

Both competitors already built the obvious fix. Nintendo ran an official lottery through the My Nintendo Store for the Switch 2 launch in Japan, pulled more than two million entries, and used invitation queues tied to verified accounts in other regions. Sony set up a PS5 Pro draw in Japan that required a Japanese PSN account and at least 60 hours of playtime on PS4 or PS5 across the previous two years. Neither system is fair in any cosmic sense, but both start from the assumption that consoles should reach players. Microsoft went with a refresh button and a shrug.

The CriticalPixel take

None of this is an accident, and Xbox Wire's own recap of the anniversary weekend shows how little the console matters to the plan. The post leads with Halo firefight in the Winter Update, free in game cosmetics for Forza, Gears and Minecraft, and a FanFest finale in Seattle. The $899 box gets a line. The strategy is Game Pass and software, which is fine, except Microsoft still chose to make 25 years of history into a limited drop with no purchase limits and no queue. A company that did not care about hardware scalping would not have engraved a number on the chassis.

If you want one, do not pay $4,950. Watch Microsoft's own store for restocks, ignore the marketplace listings asking double, and let the flippers sit on inventory they bought with bots. A console nobody can buy is not a collectible. It is a warehouse full of green plastic with a serial number, waiting for a buyer who has already moved on. Twenty five years of Xbox deserved better than a checkout page that loads faster than the stock does.