Usually, when a gaming company releases a new console, it expects customers to quickly start clamoring for the latest and greatest and start ignoring its aging predecessor. With the November 7 launch of the $499 Xbox One X, though, Microsoft's Head of Xbox Phil Spencer says he doesn't expect the old, $249 Xbox One S to decline in popularity any time soon.

"[Xbox One] S will be the console that most people will buy," Spencer told Ars at an interview before the E3 trade show. "Obviously we don't know [the ratio]. When we designed [the One X], it's not that we expected it to become the number one console from us... Xbox One S is a great console for the everyday gamer, someone who's just looking to play games."

That said, Spencer continued, "you and I both know there's a customer who is looking for the premium experience, the highest fidelity. I don't think [Xbox One X] has any competition in that space. The other consoles we've seen this generation are all competing at a sub-true 4K level. The price is really dictated by the capability of the box."

The inflection point

To those who might scoff at spending twice as much as an Xbox One S for a console that doesn't boast any exclusive titles, Spencer points to the Xbox One Elite controller , which launched at $150. When that was announced, Spencer said, "people were asking me questions about the price there, 'Hey how can you sell a controller for that amount of money?' and I said the same thing: We designed a controller at that amount of money... then we sold everything we could make at the holiday."

For Spencer, the need for the Xbox One X arose out of an inflection point between advancements in consumer display technology and the state-of-the-art PC game development. "I think last holiday here in the US, over 50 percent of the TVs that were sold were 4K televisions, so I think you're starting to see consumers pick it up," said Spencer of the display market. "I think the combination of HDR and 4K is a pretty striking difference from what you see."

It's not just 4K TV owners Microsoft is targeting with the X, though. "When we've done some of our early research, about 50 percent of the people who said they're interested in Xbox One X have been 1080p customers," Spencer said. "That could change as they see things, but it's why we spent so much time on the supersampling and making sure that it's there, because what people said was 'I want a more constant frame rate,' we'll be able to do that for games that maybe lag at certain points on current consoles."































The jump to "true 4K" graphics can be a bit of a harder sell than the previous jump to standard high-definition, Spencer admits. "From the original Xbox to Xbox 360, with the 4:3 to 16:9 HD, it's so obvious." That said, "I think the 4K stuff we're able to show... shows a marked difference between anything that's in [a] console today and what's possible here."

"Can every customer tell?" Spencer asked rhetorically. "Is that a resolution difference or an HDR difference, or an art difference in general?" The question went unanswered, but Spencer pointed to 4K videos like Planet Earth 2 and games like Forza Motorsport 7 as reference points that really show off the 4K difference.

Not that every consumer is going to need that level of detail, of course. "It was interesting to me going back and playing something like Red Dead [backward compatibility] from 360 on Xbox One," he added. "It looks really good. You kind of forget... if you get close or things you can kind of tell it's a 360 game running on Xbox One. But if you just sat back from a casual customer [point of view] and you'd say 'Wow, that looks like a great video game.'"

But on the development side, Spencer pointed out that, for many PC studios, "they've already built the 4K versions. I've been seeing these games on PC for a long time and there's definitely a difference. It's not the same difference from 4:3 to 16:9. That's aspect ratio as well... but it's stunning some of the work developers are able to do now."

Taking advantage of that 4K development, Spencer said, isn't just about outpowering the PlayStation 4 or PS4 Pro, both of which are largely seen as outclassing the Xbox One S from a hardware standpoint. "I definitely want Xbox to stand for power, I think it's part of the brand promise. [But] I'm not going to get into a leapfrog competition. At some point something else will get announced I'm sure, that's just what happens with hardware."

"This one was a really interesting cross-section for us with real, full frame 4K that we can do," he continued. "Let's go make a console for that, but make it part of the family, because not everybody's going to want to leave the two-, three-, four-year investment they made. I do want Xbox to stand for power, but I want more for it to stand for great games."

The future

So should Xbox gamers who want a top-of-the-line console expect to have to replace their box every four years from now on? Spencer was hesitant to predict how the Xbox line will continue to evolve following this mid-generation upgrade.

"I don't have a fixed kind of timeline for hardware or when it lands," he said. "When we were doing our games on PC and designing for 4K and talking to our partners, we felt like... we saw this great intersection between what was happening with 4K on PC that none of the other consoles were targeting.... so we said let's go build a console for that sweet spot.

"I'm now spending a lot of time talking to developers asking what is that next hardware spec," he continued. "Is it 120 frames per second, but then do TVs support 120fps? Is it 8K? Not yet, that's further out. I don't want to hit a new hardware platform just to say I did it."

While the Xbox One S and Xbox One X run a united set of software right now, Spencer acknowledged there may be a point in the future where the legacy hardware has to be dumped from the console family. "I do think about it like a PC, but even in the PC space at some point [you just have to get rid of it]... The reason we stopped manufacturing the [Xbox] 360 was literally some of the pieces that went in that box you just could no longer buy. It was a 12-year-old piece of consumer electronics. Those kinds of things happen."

"Fast forwarding many, many years, consoles and where they go, we'll have to talk about something we're doing in the space," he continued. "We don't have a roadmap that says Xbox One S falls off the train [here], but I'll be very open and honest with the customers as we move through the different thresholds. But compatibility is very important to me, so I want to keep supporting the hardware as long as I can."

Other hardware?

While virtual reality got a brief mention during the announcement of "Project Scorpio" at last year's E3, the feature wasn't mentioned during the roll-out of the Xbox One X. Spencer said that was intentional.

"We haven't had people climbing over us saying, 'Hey, when can you deliver a family room VR experience,'" he said. "I think a little of the setup with TV and dragging cables across the room is a little difficult."

Though PlayStation VR recently surpassed a million sales, Spencer says he doesn't necessarily see that as indicative of a huge demand for living room VR. "I lived through shipping Kinect; I think we sold 17 million in the first year. That's obviously not a shot at PSVR. That is their platform, the PlayStation console, so of course that's where they're gonna go innovate... we're finding the most [virtual reality] adoption on Windows, because it's an open platform that anyone can go develop for. I don't need to also go on console just to say we're going to do it."

And while the Switch has proven there continues to be demand for what Spencer calls a "magical" portable console experience, that doesn't have Microsoft clamoring to follow Nintendo with a portable Xbox. "I don't know that we're the right company to necessarily go in [and make a portable console]," he said. "We haven't taken it off the table at all. Again, I think about experience first. I think about platform services and games and the hardware to go enable that. It seems there's a lot of good companies doing portable hardware in the gaming space, and maybe there's an opportunity to do more with them and do their thing."