written by Jih-Wei Peng
The Console Wars go ever on and on, and the latest development is leaked intelligence from Microsoft HQ revealing the existence of a second next-gen console in development: the Xbox Series S. While details are scarce at the moment (though a full announcement seems likely later this month), earlier leaks on the subject of “Project Lockhart” suggest that the Series S is intended to go up on the market alongside the Series X as a lower-cost alternative with less raw power, though still capable of playing all the same games.
This is a pretty interesting development given that Sony announced their own PS5 Digital, a low-cost alternative to the PS5 missing no more than an optical disc drive. Price has always been one of the key aspects in the console wars, and this year both sides are pushing the envelope of affordability to present customers with something less than a solid brick of raw power and dollars.
But while going digital-only is a logical way to cut down the price, if the rumors about the Series S trading power for price are true then Microsoft might well have struck upon a pretty fundamental truth: Gamers want to game and it’s a lot easier to do that if you can afford a console AND rent at the same time, resolution and Frames per second be damned. The most powerful system in the world is irrelevant if it’s out of your price range, and if there’s an option that allows you to play the games you want cheaper while still performing reasonably well, that’s going to look like an attractive trade to a lot of people.
That in and of itself seems like a pretty nice package, but it gets better when you consider Microsoft’s new Smart Delivery system. With the ability to upgrade to optimized versions of your games for free as you upgrade your console and to transfer save files and other data across console, this could potentially mean that you could seamlessly upgrade from the Series S to the Series X if you get that fancy new promotion and raise your boss has been talking about – or for that matter, if you bought a game for the Xbox One prior to the release of the Series S and then picked up the Series S when it came out, it’d upgrade automatically to the Series S version, effectively making such games pre-launch titles which can prove very helpful for Microsoft given the news of Halo: Infinite’s delay.
The devil’s in the details, however. There almost certainly is a market for reasonable power at reasonable prices, but how much exactly is reasonable? Presumably “capable of running everything the Series X can” and “better than the Xbox One” is a minimum, but at what quality? Is it merely a case of running at 1080p instead of 4k, or are bigger performance cuts going to be expected? Which features will be sacrificed, and will the sacrifice be worth it?
Not only that but if the Series X and Series S are coming out close on each others’ heels and have notably different hardware configurations, that raises the possibility of complications with tech support and supply chains. Microsoft has deep pockets, it’s true, but do they have the ability to run two console lines nearly simultaneously?
And there is, of course, the biggest question of them all: What is the actual price? It’s all very well to talk about the wisdom of a low-cost alternative strategy, but that’s all moot if we don’t know what the prices are and how they stack up against each other, and unfortunately, Sony and Microsoft are both playing their cards as close to their chests as possible in their ongoing pricing brinksmanship as they desperately strive to avoid being the more expensive console while trying not to price themselves out of business entirely.
The way things are going it’s liable we’ll only learn what each respective price tags are the day of release – or possibly later if sales researchers can perfect quantum pricing in time, leaving the price in a state of superposition until the waveform is finally collapsed by the announcement of their rival’s price or until Schrodinger’s cat chooses to go Paragon or Renegade, whichever comes first.
Still, while much remains up in the air even the suggestion that the big players are starting to think seriously about low-cost alternatives is a welcome one given the current economic uncertainty. Even if the Series S turns out to be a flop or even possibly non-existent or an aborted project, the spate of interest surrounding its rumors is a good sign that there is indeed a market for such, and a future of more options for gamers on a budget is greatly welcomed.