The Slim version sold slightly better, but Microsoft's hopes for maintaining a presence in the living have pretty clearly been pinned on their new Scorpio console for a while now. We've been hearing for months about how Scorpio was going to be the most powerful console ever made, but details have been sparse, and genuine hype has been hard for Microsoft to maintain. Apparently they're aware of that problem, though, so they're doing everything they can to make as big a splash as possible when Scorpio is actually rolled out, which should be any day now.
Which brings us to those specs.
The specs themselves look impressive enough... for a console. And apparently performance is also pretty good... for a console. But are the specs impressive enough, and is the performance good enough, so lure gamers away from their PS4's and Steam accounts, and back to an XBox environment which Microsoft has very strongly tied to Windows 10?
Probably not, at least according to Gizmodo:
We finally know the specs for Microsoft’s supercharged Xbox One: the Project Scorpio console. They’re impressive. The GPU has nearly four times as many compute units as the original Xbox One and the memory on the console will be 108GB/s faster than the memory in both the Xbox One S and Scorpio’s primary challenger, the PS4 Pro. On paper this thing reads like lightning.
In practice it means jack shit.
As proven in many previous console wars, specs alone aren’t enough to win the race. A system needs a lot more if it wants to unseat a challenger. According to Superdata there are twice as many PS4 consoles in the wild as Xbox One machines. A report earlier this year suggest that Sony has sold 55 million units of its next-gen console to Microsoft’s 26 million unit sales. That’s not just a win from a sales perspective. It makes it appealing for prospective console owners too. If they’re investing in a console for Overwatch or Destiny 2 or any of the other multiplayer games available (or soon to be available), then they’ll have twice as large a base of players to compete with on a PS4. Sony is winning, and it’s not just because it got its souped up console to market nearly a full year before Microsoft.
[...] This highlights Microsoft’s fundamental console problem. The company knows how to make its product shine. Beating the PS4 Pro to market with a console that doubles as a UHD Blu-ray player was smart. And announcing the specs for its new souped up challenger two months before it’s officially revealed at E3 is a great way to build hype. But all that polish on the Xbox One, One S, and Scorpio can’t cover up the console’s biggest problem—games. [...] Microsoft’s exclusive Halo and Gears of War franchises are a good draw, but they lack the allure of Sony-only blockbusters.
Sony has Naughty Dog’s excellent Uncharted 4, and the gorgeous Last of Us remake (as well as the upcoming sequel). Those aren’t just critically-acclaimed games for this console generation—they’re considered outright masterpieces. The same might be said of February’s Horizon: Zero Dawn or last year’s Bloodborne.
[...] So the great specs Microsoft announced earlier this morning? Those aren’t going to be enough to help it scramble back to the top of the console heap. But its certainly a start. Which is more than Microsoft could say yesterday.Yes, four years after launching the XBox One, Microsoft are finally starting to actually run in the current race for console domination. Sony, meanwhile, has already lapped them, killed off Nintendo's offering the process, and is winning the sales war on VR as well (something else that Gizmodo mentions), all while making it look easy.
I have to agree with Gizmodo's take on today's Scorpio spec reveal; they're very shiny specs, but it's a little late in this race for Microsoft to be leaning on specs alone. Especially not if you're a PC gamer... which, statistically, most gamers are (125+ million Steam users, 55+ million PS4 owners... do the maths).
But don't take my word for that. From PC Gamer:
How does all of this compare to our PC platform? It's a bit apples to oranges, since we have the ability to customize all of our components. The best approximation of the performance offered by Scorpio is our budget PC build, which includes a Core i3-7100, 8GB RAM, and an RX 480 8GB graphics card. It also has a larger case, PSU, and a 500GB SSD, and it costs around $700.
[...] Put another way, the current Xbox One has hardware that looks positively pathetic in many areas. Sure, it has eight CPU cores, but each CPU is about one third the performance of a single i3 core. Eight of them working together might, maybe, match a Core i3 in a few specific workloads. The graphics meanwhile is like an HD 7770, a chip that came out in early 2012 and which would struggle with modern games.
[...] Now triple the performance of the Xbox One, and you can see how this might challenge a desktop PC for gaming prowess. It doesn't have the raw power a PC has, but it makes better use of its power.
[...] Today's top-end PC GPUs like the GTX 1080 are still much better suited to 4K gaming at high and ultra settings, and CPUs like AMD's Ryzen and Intel's Kaby Lake are much newer, more efficient architectures. If Scorpio ends up a capable 4K 60 fps gaming machine, that should only mean good things for PC gaming: we should expect all the ports from Microsoft's console to meet that standard on PC, too.So, it's a budget PC for a budget price, meant to compete with PCs, released at a time when PC sales have been in decline for years, and that lives in your living room. You can't upgrade it, which is a bit of a bummer but not as big a deal as it would have been while Moore's Law was still driving PC upgrade cycles. It only runs Windows 10, but most PC gamers seem to be OK with that, anyway (alas). But... if your gaming PC pre-dates the Obama administration, and you're in the mood for a budget PC that will probably be good enough for your gaming needs for years to come, and have a nice, big TV to connect it to, then I guess Scorpio could be decent value. It will probably sell a few million units this year.
It's not game-changing, though, and I don't think that Sony need to be worried. Kudos to Microsoft for not giving up, but I doubt that this is going to move the market in any major way.