Microsoft Gaming head Phil Spencer doesn’t mince words about how he feels about mid-generation console upgrades.
In the eight generation of consoles, both Microsoft and Sony offered upgrades to their consoles in the middle of the lifetime of their consoles. Microsoft announced the Xbox One X first in E3 2016, followed by Sony’s announcement of the PlayStation 4 Pro that September. The PlayStation 4 Pro would then be released in November, while the Xbox One X came out in November 2017, a full year later.
As any gamer who had consoles at the time will tell you, both Xbox and PlayStation owners definitely felt the difference when they got both mid-generation upgrades. While both promised that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One could output to 4K at launch, few developers were actually making games that lived up to that promise.
The Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro made enough upgrades to make that possible, and they also fed an appetite for consumers to upgrade their screens to be 4K capable. It’s also noteworthy that the Xbox One X had a real CPU upgrade, from the bespoke Jaguar APU on the Xbox One clocked at 1.75 GHz, to a new Scorpio Engine SOC clocked at 2.3 GHz.
Because of that very real upgrade, multiple press outlets, and the fans themselves, attested that the Xbox One X was definitely the more powerful console of the two. It wasn’t enough for Xbox to make real headway against Sony, but their loyal Xbox fans experienced that benefit anyway.
Things are much more different now. Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series are capable of running games at 4K just fine. On the flip side, while the gaming discourse revolves around now standardizing 60 FPS, Sony has delivered in the PlayStation 5 Pro a console that can improve performance for all games that make use of their hardware, they don’t live up to that demand for 60 FPS across the board.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Spencer was asked about doing another upgrade in light of the PlayStation 5 pro’s recent release. Here’s what Spencer had to say:
“We think about hardware that can create unique value for our players or creators on our platform. We don’t need to do incremental hardware for our own benefit.
Does a new device really give you a unique experience on screen in some way? [It’s] less like the old days, going from the original Xbox to 360; that was standard definition to high definition. Now, [it’s] harder to show the benefits.”
Since Microsoft’s decision to upgrade the Xbox One led to choosing a more powerful CPU, if Spencer did greenlight making an upgrade to the Xbox Series line, he would likely have commissioned yet another upgraded CPU, which is more than what Sony is willing to do.
So there could be an alternate world out there where we did get an Xbox Series XX, or whatever Microsoft would have decided to call it. But that much more powerful Xbox, that would have also probably outperformed the PlayStation 5 Pro we have now, would have also been priced at $ 700, or even higher.
And as Spencer argues, would their consumers feel any benefit if they did go ahead with that? Microsoft did make upgraded versions of their consoles, like the Xbox Series X Galaxy Black Edition. But the improvements in the hardware in these consoles were more towards making their components smaller. These improvements may make the newer Xboxes cheaper to make and last longer, but they won’t necessarily run that much better.
These new Xboxes are not being sold as an upgrade to the Xboxes that their fans have now, that would require them to spend over $ 1000 in this console generation. A setup like that would have benefited Microsoft more than their customers, so it’s important to recognize that Spencer and Xbox chose not to do that.
As for Sony users? They should know well by now what they are buying into, if they are double dipping for this generation. Not every Sony fan is afforded that privilege, but the consumer behavior Sony sees from this may lead to choices all their fans won’t be enjoying in the future.
