When the Xbox One launched, it was less powerful than the PS4, yet $100 more expensive. And it was severely punished for it. That said, according to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, Microsoft will not make this mistake again with the Xbox Scarlett. That doesn’t mean its next-gen Xbox will be cheap, but it at least won’t be making any sacrifices on the power side of things. In fact, according to Spencer, the Xbox Scarlett will not “sacrifice performance for the sake of price.”
“I will say, from the launch of Xbox One, I’ve definitely learned that being too expensive and not powerful enough is not a great place to be,” said Spencer while speaking to Eurogamer “And price and performance are going to be important, and we’re very focused on both of those things.”
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Spencer continued, claiming Xbox Scarlett — or Project Scarlett as he refers to it — is the most important thing Xbox has ever done, and it hopes to use to springboard itself to the top of the industry.
“Project Scarlett is the most important thing we’re doing next year,” said Spencer. “Leading in the console industry is something we want to do both in sales as well as leading in things like cross play, back compat, and Game Pass and all of the innovations we’ve brought in Xbox One. Yeah, we’re going to continue to invest in cloud because we think it allows us to bring that experience to more and more people. But we’re years away from that competing from a fidelity standpoint and a kind of feel for what people do on a local device.”
As you can see, the strategy of Xbox isn’t too lean more into streaming than traditional console gaming, or vice versa, but offer equally compelling products in both. And if everything goes to plan, Project xCloud and Project Scarlett will let Microsoft do both of these things.
Xbox Scarlett is poised to release sometime holiday 2020. At the moment of publishing, we don’t have many salient details on the console, but you can peep all of past and recent coverage of the next-gen system by clicking right here.
