Halverwege de vorige generatie kwamen Microsoft en Sony PlayStation met een meer krachtige console, de PlayStation 4 Pro en Xbox One X. De geruchten wijzen op de komst van een PlayStation 5 Pro, maar Microsoft gaat dit keer niet mee met een krachtiger Xbox Series X|S model.

In een interview met Eurogamer legt Xbox topman Phil Spencer uit waarom ze voor nu geen plannen  hebben om met een nieuw model te komen. Het heeft te maken met waar de pc op dit moment staat en in hoeverre consoles daarop achterlopen, maar ook brengen nieuwe modellen complicaties met zich mee.

Met name voor ontwikkelaars, die zich op specifieke platformen moeten richten bij het ontwikkelen van games. Een ander probleem – hoewel Spencer dat niet specifiek benoemd – is dat er in het kamp van Xbox dan drie modellen zouden zijn, waarbij de Xbox Series S wellicht té ver achter gaat lopen op de rest, wat niet gewenst is.

“I definitely think that when we do hardware, it should have a reason to exist that is demonstrably different than what came before. I think that’s important. Gen 10 – now you get more of my religion on this – I think what happens for us as an industry – and other people with other platform affinities are going to argue with me about this – but sometimes you feel really great about the price performance of the console early in the generation. And then later in the generation, we look at what’s happening on a PC. And we say, ‘how come our consoles can’t do that?’ And the reason is, because when you plan for a console, you start two or three years before you launch it, and you kind of lock-in to a hardware spec. And then that’s the spec you’re gonna have for five, six, seven years. And because the pricing of consoles have gone up, it’s closer to PC than it’s probably ever been in terms of price and performance.

I think what we get ourselves into is this world of like, ‘Should we do a mid-gen refresh? Because we think every game should be 4K 60fps. And we’re not seeing that right now so, clearly, we need to mid-gen refresh.’ As soon as you start doing mid-gen refreshes, you’ve got a bunch of issues in front of developers, on what platform they target. And it starts to feel a lot more like PC – which is clearly a good ecosystem that’s healthy, but then I’m like, ‘Okay, well, what’s the difference then between console and PC, if we’re in this mode of every two years, a new GPU comes out, or CPU?’ And there’s a bunch of things. I mean, we are the Windows company. We know what it means to run a platform that’s more continuous and, I will say, open. I actually love that for console gaming. I love having Discord on our platform, which is something 10 years ago, Xbox would have been like, ‘no way!'”