Has Microsoft ruled out an upgraded version of the Xbox Series X console as a mid-generation upgrade for the existing line-up of consoles? According to an interview with Bloomberg, Xbox chief Phil Spencer doesn’t ‘feel an imperative’ to deliver a more powerful machine, saying ‘right now, we’re set on the hardware we have’.
This is the primary discussion point for this week’s DF Direct Weekly – and based on how the console generation has developed in its first 2.5 years, it’s difficult to argue against the Xbox team’s thinking. Microsoft itself has only just finished developing for the last generation Xbox One console and across the industry, developers and publishers are finally letting go of the older hardware. Meanwhile, technologies designed specifically for the current consoles are at last arriving: across the summer, we should start to see the first game to utilise Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 technology. If we’ve yet to see what the current wave of consoles can actually do, is there actually an imperative to deliver a more powerful machine?
In the Bloomberg interview, Spencer also talks about ‘feedback’ suggesting that such a machine probably isn’t a good idea – but what can that feedback actually be? Creating a console takes several years, so either a new machine was developed and canned in the meantime based on this feedback or else Spencer’s taking a look at the last-gen base vs enhanced console split, which was around 80/20 in favour of the cheaper, less capable machine. Was that 20 percent of users just too low to be worth the effort of going through the console development cycle again? Is it even possible to deliver a meaningful upgrade within the next couple of years?
00:00:00 Introduction00:01:05 News 01: No Xbox enhanced machine planned?00:21:17 News 02: Microsoft no longer developing for Xbox One00:32:08 News 03: TLOU PC patch 1.1 analysed!00:44:47 News 04: Sony announces PS5 cloud streaming00:55:41 Supporter Q1: Should Starfield have an uncapped VRR mode on consoles?01:05:19 Supporter Q2: I didn’t like the 30fps option in FF16, but Tears of the Kingdom seems fine – why could this be?01:07:26 Supporter Q3: Alex was once excited about the possibilities of DX12 several years ago. Does he miss that version of himself?01:12:05 Supporter Q4: Could systems with unified memory setups be a solution to VRAM woes on PCs?01:15:32 Supporter Q5: Are FSR 2’s image quality concerns an issue for console software going forward?01:22:20 Supporter Q6: If you could alter one thing about game development, what would it be?
I often refer readers to our Series S big interview from back in the day, where Microsoft laid out in precise terms why it launched two consoles simultaneously. Put simply, the firm saw no realistic way to make Series X substantially cheaper across the console generation, so it introduced a lower spec model at launch instead of a cost-reduced ‘flagship’ machine further down the road. That prophecy has come to pass: the only new hardware we’re seeing from Microsoft is a 1TB Xbox Series S – $50 more expensive than the $299 512GB model released 2.5 years ago. By extension, the same price constraints make a cost-effective ‘Pro’ console that much more challenging.