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Consumers should not get worried over the Xbox Scorpio launch price, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has told WinBeta.
Although very much seen as a premium system, the Scorpio will not have a price disconnect to the Xbox One S and its various forms.
“So you can see the price of the S today. When we designed both of these, which we kind of designed it in parallel. 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,” explained Spencer.
Spencer continued: “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.”
In the UK the Xbox One S is available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB forms, priced £249, £299 and £349, respectively. Spencer’s comments indicate the Scorpio will be priced higher than the One S, so we could be looking at £399.
A £399 price point would fall in line with a recent suggestion from senior director of product management and planning at Xbox, Albert Penello, that the Scorpio would launch at a price comparable to the PS4 Pro – which will launch next month priced £349.
In the UK the most expensive launch price for a mainstream console was £425 for the 60GB PS3 back in March 2007.
Launching at a price above £400 would be a brave, possibly foolish, move by Microsoft. Scorpio may be targeting the hardcore gamer willing to pay a premium for the ultimate Xbox experience, but Microsoft would risk losing the momentum it has slowly built in the years following the poor Xbox One launch.
Xbox fans should also expect the Scorpio to retain the Ultra HD Blu-ray drive found in the One S, even if Microsoft isn’t yet ready to commit to the console’s full spec.
“We’ve seen great adoption of it with the S. People seem to like it, but those kinds of decisions aren’t the decisions that we announced at E3,” explained Spencer. “That’s not a push-back, I’m just saying those are the kind of decisions that can kind of bind later, what the drive is. But it has been really great to see how people have responded to the S, and it seems like we would want to continue to ride that option.”
Xbox One S is expected to launch holiday 2017.
Source: WinBeta
