It’s mass market for core gamers. Not casuals. The distinction here is that MS is targeting those casuals AND core gamers from day 1. Never been done before. Nor has All Access or Game Pass kinda value from day 1.
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There isn’t really a way to prove gamepass “hasn’t helped MS sell more xboxes thus far” (than they would have without it), and before anything is said, no the onus of proof on this is on the one who made the statement.
A 399 PS5 DE isn’t the magic bullet folks think it is, Consumers aren’t one size fits all, they aren’t going into stores having done a cost benefit analysis and deciding what logically and optimally is the best purchase. And even if they were there isn’t an objective “best purchase” for every person. There are many who are simply going to get the cheapest way to play most of the games they want to play for the foreseeable future and don’t care about 4k or “how much flops per dollar” or what does “Real/True Next Gen” enough to spend an additional 100 dollars (not to mention the money for a new tv). Similarly there are many who aren’t just gonna get the cheapest thing if it doesn’t have features they want (Switch regular selling more than Switch Lite is a good example of this). But if a graphical difference was suddenly the big decider on that then xbox one x and ps4 pro would have sold way more than they did.
Lastly , it’s not a zero sum game, it’s not all about console wars, Microsoft’s plans don’t solely exist in opposition to Sony’s or to sell more systems than them, a thing they have said thousands of times now. If any of their plans are only “smart” or a “success” if it means selling more xboxes than playstations then they might as well quit right now. It exists to give folks as much options as possible for how they feel comfortable being in their ecosystem. People really need to let go of this horse race stuff, this year for Microsoft and their big successes on releases across various platforms and storefronts should be already a sign of where things are headed.
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$100 is a sizable difference to a lot of people. Imo, the Xbox One had a better launch line up than the PS4, but the PS4 was $100 cheaper and sold significantly better over time. Obviously the price wasn’t the only factor in that situation, but it 100% made an impact. Having a console that’s $100 cheaper than the nearest competitor, lower performance or not, is a big deal.
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When you confuse your conjecture and opinion with ‘truth’, that isn’t gonna ever sit well with folks looking for good faith discussion (since it ain’t commentary offered in good faith).
Game Pass came in too late in the X1 cycle to change sales trajectory for the hardware. This time around it is part of the industry lexicon from day 1. Everyone is talking about it positively all the time. A $400 PS5 is great, but won’t tap into the casual market. It will just eat into sales from the disc based PS5. People interested in getting XSS are casuals or kids who have 1080p TV’s to game on. XSS is the best option for those folks since value and simplicity is important to them. Sony is not competing for these casuals (nobody does at first, until now).
I bet XSS will the top selling sku in the US and UK for next gen consoles this holiday season. I bet All Access will be a wild success in its own right too. I bet lots of ppl with a shiny new PS5 will see XSX available for no money down and grab that for the best possible combo. I bet that these folks end up Xbox gamers moreso than PSX gamers after spending their time playing tons of free games on GP that are also superior than the PS5 version. And I bet XSX does great with hardcore gamers too.
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Opinion =/= Truth. 
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The Series S will likely store more games than the PS5, so any argument that it’s too small needs to recognize that there are two PS5 units that will be worse.
Games with 1/4 the resolution target will feature 1-2K textures vs 4-8K textures. That’s 1/4 less data for textures. Animations, sounds, models are all the same size, but textures account for a lot of a game’s size.
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MS “caught pants down” on software? Lmao
Then we can say Sony caught with no pants at all on hardware side
See we can go on and on…
Anyway, both will do great, they will be fine and have both a big start, this gen is way more competitive than before. This time MS didn’t shoot themselves in the foot and have a strong foundation.
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On that leaked news video for announcing SS one of the girls mentioned they were adding new features on dash to help with that (she mentioned in regards to moving games from ssd to external hdd and some unannounced stuff on how the cloud can help with that, I’m thinking something like keeping part of the games games in a cloud storage and download them when needed, as well streaming while it downloads)
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I heard that too. I think the cloud support is maybe you can start to play the game from the cloud while the game is copied from a to b. Because anything else doesn’t make sense as the speed to the network is was to slow for any storage management support (imo)
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Yeah, Only scenario I can see is something like keep/download the current level your save is and once you start playing stream the next one, it could potentially have enough time to download.
(And it was announced as one supported scenario when they announced smart delivery for xbone, though I’m not aware of a single game that uses it like that)
Quite interesting
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That’s a good point actually. Hadn’t thought about that part. Hmmmm.
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Yeah this is a point I’m surprised hasn’t caught on more. What are the difference in file sizes between 4K and 1080P assets today? I don’t know the exact percentage but 4K downloads are always larger.
Also SSD files could be much smaller. Theoretically could be 1/3rd smaller if developers put in the work to have different files for SSD games. They don’t need the repeated assets like they do with mechanical drives. Sometimes assets could be on the same file 6 times in order to be retrievable quicker on HDDs.
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Of course, no one knows how successful Series S will be, because this kind of console hasn’t been done before at the start of a new generation. I love that Xbox is shaking things up this time and in my opinion this box looks great! The more I look at it, the more I like it. Combine the hot looks with that sweet 299$ price tag and you got a great product on your hands. I also love the special edition potential for this box. Sooner or later I will get the S as a 2nd machine.
To add to that, the sentiment I got online is people love how tiny the formfactor and price is. Haven’t seen this much positivity for anything Xbox-related in a long time. So yeah super excited for the launch in less than 2 month!
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Hey, I mean this in a friendly way - can we please not refer to women as girls? Especially when we’re talking about someone like Liz Hamron, who is a corporate vice president at Microsoft and the head of the entire Xbox hardware team. It comes across as disrespectful or dismissive, IMO, though I’m guessing you didn’t mean it that way.
On topic: yes, good catch 
I hope they do some cool things to help with space management.
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Im sure the point has already been made but remember, part of the reason MS has been so vocal about its “Smart Delivery” system is because it’ll directly effect game sizes. A game on the Series S (with no 4K textures etc…) will absolutely be smaller than the same game on the Series X.
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Exactly. Take Borderlands 2 for example. The game is 27.95 GB and you can download a separate Ultra HD texture pack that weighs another 7.66 GB. Theoretically we will only download what the console needs with Smart Delivery. That’s a huge difference. In Borderlands’ case, the texture pack alone is responsible for 21.5%.
Heh. It is in times like these that we truly understand how needed this forum really is.
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Agreed✅
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I definitely didn’t mean in any demeaning or disrespectful way, in my group of friends/family it’s a loving way to referring to each other (and not just girls, we use boys a lot too)
But I can see how can it be seen as disrespectful, so sorry about that, will try to avoid that in the future.
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SS and SX have been designed to sandwich a $399 ps5.
If the ps5 comes at that, that’s the exact scenario Ms wanted to be in, anything higher than that is just an extra advantage.
Of course, that does not mean SS will come out on top or anything like that. It’s very possible it fails to capture the audience.
But this is the scenario Ms wanted and defined their strategy against. Not some situation they ended up unwillingly.
But it has helped. There has been multiple reports in many countries of xbone sales seeing a sales surge since S and gamepass.
And that’s for a console no one wanted because of the bad press.
It will be definitely have an even greater effect right at the start of the generation. For a brand new console that is a much better position than xbone was against ps4, and with all that available right from the start.
Enough to turn the tables? No. But it doesn’t need to.
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