Touted as the most powerful console ever, there’s no doubt the Xbox Scorpio is going to come with a hefty price tag. Instead of making devoted Xbox gamers pay for an entire new console however, Microsoft is counting on them trading in their original Xbox Ones for a reduced price on the Scorpio.
Speaking with The Daily Star (Fair warning: there are NSFW images on that link), General Manager at Xbox Services David McCarthy explains Microsoft doesn’t want current owners paying full price. “Some of our retail partners today do trade-in programs and that’s definitely going to be partnerships we continue to move going forward. We want to make that transition as smooth as possible,” he says.
“The compatibility thing is a big deal, because you feeling you have to give up your games isn’t a good feeling, so we take that angst out of the equation. We’ll try partnerships with our retail partners to smooth it even more with trade-in programs and things like that.”
He goes on to add, “We are making a meaningful step with Project Scorpio in supporting 4K gaming. But you don’t have to worry about that as a gamer, because the games you already own on Xbox One, the ones you’re going to buy this year and in the future will work across the family of devices (Xbox One, Xbox One S and Scorpio)”
The Xbox Scorpio, likely similar to the PlayStation Neo, is a new type of ‘generational bump’ in the console space, as McCarthy calls it. The console will be a large hardware upgrade, but will still be compatible with current-gen games and accessories. It’s that very fact that Microsoft is banking on to push gamers to buy the new system and not let what could be construed as a truncated lifecycle for the Xbox One make anyone feel cheated.
Announced at E3, Xbox Scorpio will feature an 8-core GPU, 320GB of memory bandwidth, and a graphics card with six teraflops of performance. The console is built with both 4K and VR in mind. Unfortunately we still don’t have a release date or price for the console, though it is promised for a 2017 launch.