Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, recently spoke with Gamasutra in which he revealed the reason as to why Project Scorpio will be coming out a year after the launch of their competitors PlayStation 4 Pro. It turns out that the major reason behind holding off the release of Project Scorpio was simply due to the fact of what was available component wise at the time.
There are multiple reasons as to why Project Scorpio is taking its time before launching into the market. One of the reasons was due to the fact that Microsoft opted to wait until more consumers purchased a 4K TV likewise, most of the components available were at a price that prevented the company from seeking out a new updated console.
When talking about the PlayStation 4 Pro, Phil Spencer understands completely why Sony went with the choice of delivering a console in 2016.
“Sometimes I get in trouble when I talk about Sony too much, but, the choice they made on PS4 Pro, I totally get that choice, from their perspective and what they wanted to go do. I’ve said it publicly and I’ve said it privately, I think they’ve built a good 2016 PS4 Pro. With the silicon that was available, they picked the parts that made sense to go and put together a console in 2016.”
Although by using the available components at the time from their silicon partners, offering a higher powered resolution producing system would mean for framerate drops.
“But the point on not wanting framerate to drop when you go to the higher box, right, if the developers want to push resolution, to say to the player ‘here you bought this higher-end console, let me show you higher-end resolution,’ you don’t want the framerate to drop. And that was something we didn’t think we could deliver with the silicon that was available in 2016.
So some of it was time, as certain things come down in price — some of them not as quickly as we would like. And some of it was hardware capability from our silicon partners, that allowed us to go do that in 2017.”
Time will tell if Microsoft made the right choice as we’ll likely see Project Scorpio highlighted throughout the upcoming E3 expo this year.
