The last couple of months have been definitely interesting for Microsoft’s Xbox One gaming console. Back in June, Microsoft unveiled two new consoles, the sleeker Xbox One S which was released in August and and a more powerful console codenamed Project Scorpio which is expected to bring true 4K gaming in late 2017.
So far, it seems that the early Project Scorpio announcement did not affect Xbox One sales in a bad way as the console family was the best selling console in the US for third month in a row in September. But for those of you still wondering if Microsoft plans to bring new console hardware to the market every two or three years, Xbox head Phil Spencer reiterated to Game Informer this week that this strategy wouldn’t benefit the company and its customers (via Gamesradar) :
I don’t have this desire to every two years have a new console on the shelf; that’s not part of the console business model, and it doesn’t actually help us. The best customer I have is somebody who buys the original Xbox and just buys all the games. That’s the best customer for us in terms of the pure financials of it. I don’t have a need to get you to go buy the newest console, or I don’t have the need to create an artificial loop of, ‘Here’s a new console every two years,’ in order to get you to go buy.
As expected, the regular Xbox One is here to stay while Project Scorpio will be targeted at gamers looking for the best gaming console in the market (the console will have a 2 teraflop advantage over Sony’s Playstation 4 Pro). Additionally, the exec that he doesn’t expect Project Scorpio to bring fragmentation and complexity to the company’s Xbox business:
I’m not trying to turn consoles into the graphics card market where every so often Nvidia or AMD come out with a new card, and if I want a little bit more performance I’m going to go buy that new card. I think for consoles it’s different. I think you have to hit a spec that actually means something in an ecosystem of televisions and games.
You can read Phil Spencer’s full interview over here. Let us know in the comments if you think the exec is doing a good job at explaining the purpose of Project Scorpio to Xbox enthusiasts.
