Difficulty shoots up from 272443 to 296887 and network hash from 5771527362 to 6861833433 in just a few hours. Miners are going to get less coins for sure.
Latest stats:
"difficulty" : 296887.91143143,
"networkhashps" : 6861833433,
If diff is going up, miners get less coins, shouldn't that affect the price go up?
In theory yes, providing the demand stays the same or increases.
Even in theory price is independent of difficulty. Diff depends of the price, but price - didn't. The price of XCN was too high from the start (pumped from start because someone have mine plenty of XCN using botnets and Amazon CPU's). So wait for the fall.

In practice, price affects diff and diff in turn will affect price. The price was high when XCN just launched but soon it came down when the few miners with private mining software sold their coins. The situation has changed with the launched of the public gpu mining software and the active optimisation of the gpu miner by the dev. It created a level-playing field where many more miners can come in to mine XCN and sell them for a reasonable profit. However, as network difficulty shoots up, these miners will be mining very much less coins. They will not be able sell their coins at the same low price. They either sell their coins at a higher price or they give up mining XCN.
The network hash is breaking 318000 as I write.