The Xbox One X is an all-new 4K HDR console designed for enthusiasts. Whether you have a 4K TV or not, with Xbox One X you will see the benefits of enhanced visuals, improved loading times, and more solid frame rates and resolutions. If you have a 4K display, games will look crisper and more impressive than on any other console on the market today, according to Microsoft. We caught up with the company's Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Xbox Mike Nichols to discuss Xbox One X's price, the first-party game lineup, and much more.

Windows Central Q&A with Xbox's Mike Nichols Windows Central Senior Editor Jez Corden: So, for people who might not be familiar with you and your role at Xbox, could you give us a bit of background on what it is you do? Best VPN providers 2020: Learn about ExpressVPN, NordVPN & more Mike Nichols: Sure! I have the pleasure of running the marketing team for Xbox. So, on a day like today, when we get a chance to show off all the goodies that our genius engineers are working on, it's a real treat. That's my job. Let's talk about the "controversial" topic first: the Xbox One X's price. Plenty of commentators, including game analysts and press, have effectively said if Scorpio costs more than $399 it would be "dead on arrival." How do you respond to accusations that Xbox One X is too expensive? Well, I think the first thing that people need to understand is that the Xbox One X is part of a family. We used the language last year very purposefully that Scorpio would be the newest member of the Xbox One X's family. We wanted to offer a set of choices for gamers. Ranging from, "Hey, here's a great way to get into the Xbox One ecosystem," all the way to a console that's so powerful that it sets a new bar for what console gaming can be. Of course, you can't have one price that scales across both of those objectives. This is a new standard in console gaming quality. So, you know, we feel really fantastic about the price for the Xbox One S as a great way to get into the ecosystem, and at the same time, frankly, I'm amazed that we were able to deliver the Xbox One X's specs that are consistent with a $1,200 to $1,500 PC if you'd built it yourself, for only $500. This is a new standard in console gaming quality. And it's at a price that is within the kind of range that has been used successfully in previous consoles.

So I think what we tried to do today was explain what it is that we're trying to get done, focusing on choice for gamers, and reiterate that it's like, "Hey, you can go from an Xbox One S to an Xbox One X, and you have great choice." All games and accessories work across both. If you want to get an Xbox One S today, as many people choose to do, then good news: should you decide to upgrade to an Xbox One X sometime later, all those games and accessories will not only work on it, they'll work better on it. We feel really good about the options we're giving gamers. Since you guys placed some emphasis on the notion of preserving gaming history, with OG Xbox backward compatibility, do you think that we're no longer going to see generational gaps between consoles now? Is forwards and backward compatibility the norm? Our goal is for Xbox is to allow gamers to play the great games of the past, present, and future. We've seen such a remarkable response to the backward compatibility program that we announced a couple of years ago: 508 million hours of gameplay on backward-compatibility titles. This does nothing but reinforce to us that it's a great direction to go in. It represents real value for gamers. It's something that we believe in. Phil Spencer has been a great champion of it, personally, and we've got an absolutely great engineering team that frankly has figured out ways around this that we didn't think was possible. They've managed to prioritize it and do it.