Seagate's stronghold on Xbox expansion storage cards may be coming to an end. The company has dominated Xbox Series X and Series S SSD expansion cards since their launch, and may finally have an inexpensive alternative.

A Best Buy listing (now removed (open in new tab)) reveals that Western Digital will be releasing 1TB Xbox Series X/S expansion cards.

While still quite expensive for a terabyte, this is the first Xbox-compatible SSD to be manufactured by anyone other than Seagate. It is also $40 less than Seagate's MSRP.

Currently, the only way to play Xbox Series X games from expandable storage is to purchase these dedicated cards. The console does support external hard drives and SSDs, but those can only be used to play Xbox One and older console games.

The latter is also true for the PS5, but Sony does not impose the same SSD expansion restrictions as Microsoft. In fact, any M.2 SSD that meets various basic requirements, such as minimum read/write speeds, can be installed in the console. It is not as easy as plugging in an expansion card, but it is not that difficult a task.

As a result, the cost of PS5 compatible SSDs has dropped dramatically since their introduction. In fact, our current favorite WD Black 2TB SSD has hit an all-time low of $179 in recent weeks. Meanwhile, the 1TB Xbox expansion card has yet to drop below $189, and the 2TB card costs nearly $360.

It is unclear why Seagate has been the exclusive provider of Xbox SSDs for so long, but we couldn't be happier that this monopoly appears to be coming to an end.

Not only are Western Digital's cards cheaper, but there is now a possibility that other Xbox SSDs will appear on the market in the near future. With no competition, Seagate, after all, had no reason to lower the cost of its cards to a more reasonable level.

Theoretically, the more companies get involved in manufacturing Xbox Series X expansion cards, the lower the price should go. We have seen that with Sony, and it is very unfortunate that expansion SSDs are not available for less than retail prices these days.

Expect to see similar price reductions for Xbox expansion cards in the coming months. That said, we hope it won't be too long before they reach more reasonable levels; we don't want to pay more than two-thirds the cost of a new Xbox Series X just to add 2 TB of storage.