crispy4000

They did the same with the S and 360 (with Kinect) as well. 360 was $460 total. S is currently $550 with two years of GP and Gold included. Or $480 for S all digital. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-all-access ... You could pick up an S all digital for $150 at Walmart this weekend.

Crowdfunding is a desperation play these days, lol. It’s sunsetting.

This article implies Microsoft is betting the farm on an unannounced installment payment / leasing plan for Series X. It’s no secret they’ve wanted to go there in the past, but have we heard anything about those experiments being a success? IMO, going all in would be announcing the price in terms of an annual fee.

He’s right. Subscriptions and Fortnite money both. Its a positive, but at the same time, there will always be good indie games that won’t find an easy road into a popular subscription. Or Epic’s good graces. I want to see more bundles of indie games on consoles. Because why not?

The X's GPU and CPU are located on the same chip. Building it necessitated entirely new orders. They wouldn't have been contractually obligated to change up one over the other. It was more likely negotiated. This could have also been in the works for many years prior to us hearing about the X. Orders may not have been changed to begin with. This as well. It's just speculation.

Depends on two factors: scalability and market forces. For scalability, if Microsoft set out to make the best $500 ~1440p machine they could at the time, there'd be more of an option to. Fidelity, resolution and framerate cut backs would be likely, but perhaps not to a point where it would encroach on next-gen targets. For market forces, they'd have to keep selling enough of that box for devs to keep wanting to do new retail releases.

Nice to see Luigi's Mansion 3 hold. I went to a few Gamestops over the holidays to see if I could find it for their used B2G2 promo. Nothing.

I'll put it this way: They did everything they could at a $500 price point for a box that prioritized texture quality and ~4k resolution in current gen games. If priorities were different, a $500 X1X could have looked different.

Not with sales, no. But that's no longer a solid metric of popularity with Games Pass out there. I agree with that generally. But certainly the X could have been more forward looking if they put a SSD and better CPU in there. It might have come at the expense of trade-offs with the GPU or price tag, but it would have left door open to more fluid generations. But their clear focus was on 4K(-ish) and continuity within a generational family. That's what they prioritized. Sony too.

I'd have to search for a quote, but that sounds right. Nevermind that Series X is still claiming full backwards compatibility, so the reasoning stands a bit hollow. Both Microsoft and Sony also said their focus was to make it easy on developers to be scale up to X/Pro, or down to S/PS4, accordingly. With a focus on resolution in particular, with 4k (~faux-k) being the big selling point. The CPU wasn't as critical to that goal.

In regard to the X1X. No? I don't think there was any contractual red tape beyond going with AMD again.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, you think they were contractually obligated to keep Jaguar on the CPU end, but given the go ahead to upgrade to Polaris cores on the GPU end. In negotiations with the same company. Sounds like bollocks speculation to me.

I would expect an uptick of popularity of Halo this go around, because of Games Pass and a PC release. That's the path they've chosen, and I do think it's big a positive for their franchise reach. Generations will be meaningful for however long the console manufactuers decide to create hardware 'families.' Consoles like the Pro and X were designed to take the current gen experience to 4k. Not to be forward thinking towards next-gen demands. That's the rub. It might change in the future if we start to see a more fluid upgrade design to mid-cycle machines.

Tell me, why would Microsoft be obligated to use a Jaguar CPU architecture in a new console?