Microsoft Considered Releasing A Stronger Xbox This Year

The Xbox One Scorpio, as it exists right now, is a beast of a machine, with some monstrous specs- a generational leap over the current Xbox One, but without breaking any compatibility. The interesting thing, however, is that it wasn’t always planned to be this way. In fact, Microsoft did consider putting out a more incremental upgrade this year for a while.

“We could have done a new update this year,” Xbox’s Phil Spencer told Eurogamer. “We actually looked at it. We went all the way to, we had the spec in front of us, should we ship something that’s less than Scorpio this year, but in truth you can’t do a true 4K console this year.” Releasing it this year, Spencer says, would have led to a weird, ‘halfway’ console.

“And I just didn’t think anything between what is effectively a 1080p console and the 4K console, like, from a consumer television standpoint there’s nothing in the middle,” he explained. “So let’s go focus on 4K and next year was the right year to do that.”

Which led us to the current situation- an Xbox One S releasing this year (one which actually does have a minor spec bump), followed by a true Xbox One Scorpio next year. Personally, I think that it all worked out for the best- don’t you?