Xbox One X Won’t Outsell Base Model Because People “Just Wanna Play Games” Says Microsoft

At E3 2017 Microsoft finally fully unveiled the Xbox One X, and there's no doubt it's an impressive piece of tech. That said, given its $500 price tag and somewhat lacking support in 2017, there's been plenty of questions about who, exactly, the Xbox One X is for. Does Microsoft expect the machine to be a mainstream success, or is it niche device for hardware fanatics only?

Well, in a recent interview with Metro, Xbox boss Phil Spencer more-or-less admits it's the latter. Spencer realizes most gamers don't obsess about 4K and teraflops, and thinks the base Xbox One S will outsell the X next year...

"We have two consoles in our line: Xbox One S, now for sale for $249 in the US, and Xbox One X, the most powerful console to date. And the majority of consoles we will sell next year will be the S. There's no doubt about that. Because most of most of the people will say, 'I just want a console that plays the games I wanna play.'

Our Xbox One S will sell the most because most people are not into how many [teraflops] does this have versus someone else. Most people just want to go play games. And the breadth of games we showed was critical to me, for young and old, male and female. I wanted to make sure we had a great cross section, because at the end of the day the majority of people just wanna buy a console, put a controller in their hands, and play games they're gonna enjoy."

Well, I don't disagree, but it's kind of a surprising thing to hear from somebody who just launched a super-powerful 4K gaming device. According to Spencer, most gamers don't even particularly care about framerate.

"Developers are incentivized to give you the best experience they can. We can both agree on that. So, if they think it's 60fps and that's gonna help them, in terms of selling more copies of the game, they're gonna be all in. But not everybody understands what 60fps vs. 30fps means."

To recap, Microsoft will soon have the most popular console on the market, but most people don't really understand or care about what it can do. Soooo…shrug?

You can check out WWG's latest Xbox One coverage, right here.

[via Metro]