Microsoft says Xbox One S and Project Scorpio won't shorten console generations

Xbox boss Phil Spencer says the Xbox One, S, and Project Scorpio will all support the latest games.

Microsoft says Xbox One S and Project Scorpio won't shorten console generations

Yesterday's Xbox One S and Project Scorpio announcements have the potential to be major shake-ups from Microsoft, disrupting our entire meaning of a console generation. For consumers however, there's a more practical concern: Why purchase a brand-new system after just buying a $500 gaming device? According to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, that's not a problem. These devices are simply solely about catching up to 4K and VR tech, while the games themselves will be equally supported across all systems.

"We’re going to have versions of those games that will work on Xbox One and Xbox One S, as well as supporting Scorpio," Spencer told Wired. While both the Xbox S and Project Scorpio will support VR and 4K resolutions, the games will be designed to account for each system's hardware. "The capability to build a game that actually takes advantage of different hardware capabilities is part of any third-party dev ecosystem, or anybody who’s targeting Windows and console at the same time."

So what about the concern that Project Scorpio might shorten console generations to a much tighter cycle? Spencer claims that isn't the goal here - Microsoft is upgrading the Xbox One so it get enter the ground floor on VR and 4K technologies. "Consumer expectation is that, if you wanted to, you could go buy a new cell phone every year. I don’t want to get into that mode with a console," he explained. "I see the next inflection point as 4K, and I want to make sure we have a console there to support that, and Scorpio will do that. We’re not on a hardware tick-tock that says I need to put out a console every two years or every one year to get people to upgrade. That’s not the console model."

In other words, the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio systems are more about keeping up with the curve, and we'll quickly return to our regularly scheduled console generations. On the bright side, if Spencer turns out to be wrong, at least we'll know by the end of the decade.

The Xbox One S will launch in August. A limited edition version with a 2TB hard drive will be available for $399. Two standard editions with 500GB for $299 and 1TB for $349 will be available sometime after the limited release.

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