Microsoft have already warned us that the Xbox One Scorpio will be a ‘premium’ product- probably to prepare us from possible sticker shock for what is likely to be an expensive product, especially with its ‘most powerful console ever made’ billing. However, in a recent interview with WinBeta, Phil Spencer discussed the Scorpio price some more.
“So you can see the price of the S today. When we designed both of these, which we kind of designed it in parallel,” he said. “We thought about the price performance of what we wanted to hit with the Scorpio, relative to what we were going to be able to do with the S. So that we would have a good price continuum, so people wouldn’t look at these two things as so disconnected because of the price delta. So I think you will feel like it’s a premium product, a premium console. And not something, anything more than that. So I wouldn’t get people worried that this thing is going to be unlike any console price you’ve ever seen. We didn’t design it that way. That said, the opening price point for the Xbox One S, and the different hard drive sizes that is a critical part of this whole product. When I think about it as a product line, you should expect the pricing to kind of be in line with that.”
Of course, his statement isn’t too reassuring- after all, we have had consoles that have been priced as high as $750 in the past, which would be over a thousand bucks today with inflation factored in. Of course, the Scorpio won’t be that ridiculously expensive- but we should still be prepared for a more expensive Xbox than anything that is currently on the market, at any rate.
