The existence of the $250 Xbox One S was key to letting Microsoft reach for "full 4K" power with the Xbox One X. At least that's what Microsoft Marketing Manager Albert Penello said in an E3 interview with Ars Technica.

"It was that nice, liberating point that we had by having Xbox One S," Penello said. "We have a console at $250, it has a 4K Blu-ray player, and no one should be embarrassed or think they made the wrong choice by choosing the Xbox One S... People are turning 13 or 14 years old every day, and they need their first game console, and Xbox One S is a great option.

"It was nice to say that the specs in the box we released came from our design goals," he continued. "The box looks the way it looks with the numbers it has at the price we sell it for because that's what it took to deliver on our promises."

The Xbox One X is part of a new, mobile-phone style paradigm for Microsoft's console ecosystem, Penello said. In that ecosystem, keeping your content across hardware is almost more important than the hardware itself. "I think we're going to get in a state where your content is staying with you longer and having the generations be smoother for developers and consumers," he said.

But Penello also argues that having PC-style power tiers for consoles doesn't mean games targeting the One X will be held back by the existence of lower-powered alternatives. "The Witcher 3 is not terrible because it has to run on an integrated Intel graphics card, which is less powerful than an Xbox One or a PlayStation," he said. "I think game developers today can push the state of the art and have their engines scale to run. I think it's a fundamental design point of Xbox One X to take those engines and make it really easy."

That PC-style scaling doesn't necessarily mean console gamers will get fine control over graphical options in their Xbox games, though. "What I hear from console gamers is 'I like the ease and simplicity of just plugging a console in, and the developer gave me the best version of the game that they wanted me to see.' I think sliders on PC are a lot more for the variability in all of the options of CPUs and GPUs and memory configurations. I don't think that's the way consoles are going to go."

Check out the video above for more about the tech behind the Xbox One X and where Penello sees the Xbox ecosystem going in the future.