The thinking is that a Xbox portable would enable extra engagement time for enthusiast gamers and gamers that want to game but lacks the time to do so traditionally. Cost would not be a barrier of entry for these customers, so the portable can launch at $499.
Suppose a portable retains a few milion Gamepass subbers and gains a 1-2 new million subbers, that’s potentially a billion+ dollars in net revenue a year.
And the portable i proposed is just the “test the waters” kind of device. If a Series S level portable can improve the install base to 10 million+, there is no reason not to do it. The returns on investment would be huge. It doesn’t need to do Switch numbers at all to justify its existence.
Microsoft having a device ecosystem shouldn’t have to rely on a single platform to move 50+ million plus units. Same way a Xbox first party game doesn’t need to sell 10+ million units to be successful. We have to view the whole Xbox device ecosystem as a whole, which currently includes last gen consoles, Series consoles and PC.
If a portable can increase the install base by a few million and an ultra high end Xbox can increase the install base by another few million, then those devices will be worthy additions to the Xbox family of devices.
Steam deck actual runs PC games (windows) via Proton. Therefore, in most of the case performance will always be less when running game on Steam OS. That’s why many gamers would want to install windows natively on steam deck to get even better performance.
And no, it doesn’t do any optimization. It is more like an emulator. ( Not really but I can not explain it with my limited knowledge)
With how the market is you may as well go all out and put out a 700-800 Handheld which is what it will cost for something on Series S spec level maybe more with the Zen CPU and SSD. But you can limit performance to 720p so maybe an even weaker GPU
Anyone could plug in a USB powered monitor to a Series S but the xScreen is enticing a lot of people because of of its functionality and form factor. It also nails the specs (low latency, good pixel refresh, etc).
A $149 Xbox Series P that can be used as a regular controller for the consoles could be that enticing.
With Xbox being all about options I think this is a great one namely because of the price.
Oh, I see. I don’t think pure Xcloud device make sense. I still stick to the idea that maybe Series S blade split in half might make sense for Xbox Portable as I don’t see how they can put Series S in a handheld device - power consumption and heating will be too much for a handheld device.
I priced it out in its own thread where I pitched a streaming only device. The lack of storage, underpowered CPU, and little memory helps drive the price down.
Xbox SP! I believe any Xbox hardware that will rely on streaming should have some level of ML and have something like Auto-HDR which is trained on the native image and is applied to the streamed output image based on a certain bitrate, cleaning up any macro-blocking/blurriness that comes from streaming. Being able to de-noise game streams would give Xbox one of the cleanest images in streaming without having to increase bitrate too much.
Battery size won’t improve anywhere near as fast for that to be possible in the near future. We would need to rely on shrinking nodes + arch improvements (as in a whole redesign instead of just shrink SS soc) to get there
