Thirty7ven
Banned
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Xbox Series S / Lockhart Details To Be Revealed Soon; Console Will Be Priced At Around $300 – Rumor
- Thread starter sonomamashine
- Start date
- Rumor
We've gone back and forth on this basic question before. I've throw out possible reasons for them to take the loss to win the proverbial war. But I gotta say, after the most recent Phil interview I'm drifting more to your belief that they don't want to take a loss, or at least not much of one.
Tulipanzo
Member
I agree, just 299 is a genuine tough price to reach even with its butchered feature set.
My issue with this idea is that it doesn't seem to match their marketing, where the SeX has gotten all of MS attention for years with no word at all on Lockhart.
I think they'd more readily take a loss on the XSX.
Tulipanzo
Member
I get that it's better to take a loss on the cheapo model, but it makes little sense to not take a loss on the box they've actually been doing marketing for.
The moment they reveal the Lockhart they'd have to start talking about how it's not as bad, will it affect developers, why you'd buy a 1080p box, why not buy the X1X that can do 4K instead etc.
It's a bad position for PR, and they only seem to keep delaying having to deal with it.
Thirty7ven
Banned
The hardcore are the first in line, they got the money to spend, they want the premium model, so what's the point in taking a hit for them? They are going to buy it anyway. No point in losing money on it for the next two years if you have a lower end sku for the price sensitive buyer.
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Deleted member 471617
Unconfirmed Member
My prediction is -
Xbox Series X - $500
Xbox Series S - $300
Both release on November 6th, 2020.
Xbox Series X - $500
Xbox Series S - $300
Both release on November 6th, 2020.
Nikana
Go Go Neo Rangers!
I mean to be fair there hasn't been any marketing really. Only the enthusiasts know whats going on. Most of their marketing is always on the games and not the consoles. Even when One X was hitting you didn't see a ton of push for the console specifically but the One family. I don't see them doing much different in that regard.
Tulipanzo
Member
Yeah, but price-sensitive buyers don't buy consoles at launch, especially when there's no exclusives titles on.
Why would price-sensitive people buy a console at launch, when the cheap X1/X1X they barely just got can still play all of the games?
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Deleted member 775630
Unconfirmed Member
Well people also bought a PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, so I guess it does look better
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
But the company would be taking a blood bath in losses if they priced it at half the cost of the PS5.
I view this in the opposite direction as you. $299 and $499 looks like a TERRIBLE value proposition for the XSX (compared to Lockhart) if the only difference is 1080p vs. 4K.
Tulipanzo
Member
They have been talking about Scarlett for over 2 years now, and revealed the whole box at the Gaming Awards.
My Gamestop is already pushing people to be preorder.
The marketing has started for everyone a long time ago.
Hell, people criticize Sony for being slow, and MS hasn't even mentioned this system yet!
The lopsidedness of it all is massive.
Nikana
Go Go Neo Rangers!
Gamestop pushed people to pre order the PS4 was even a thing in my area. Again, only the hardcore know whats going on and care.
Thirty7ven
Banned
You have a 7 year gap there. A lot of price sensitive folks bought in by year 2 or 3, which is when discounts become big for example. Those might be ready to jump in if the price is right.
MS needs Gamepass numbers. How do they increase those numbers otherwise?
Those XSX sales won’t be in addiction to X1 sales. It’s gonna be their hardcore who already have gamepass.
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Tulipanzo
Member
Might be a fanboyish take but:
MS's marketing has been effective and people know they have a console coming
Still, let's assume nobody but the hardcore knows about it, after 2 E3s, several Inside Xbox shows, the Game Awards, X019 all talking about it.
How do they market the Lockhart starting from August to November?
Super Secret E3? Write it in smoke in the skies over major cities? Major Nelson comes to your house?
Seriously, this is a ridiculous assumption, I've had people in my class talk about it irl ffs!
Nikana
Go Go Neo Rangers!
Why do they need to have some grand marketing push beind just the series S. Its pretty simple. You market Halo Infinite not the box.
When someone asks which one of these Xbox's plays the Halo Game? Both. Ones the basic and ones the premium.
Tulipanzo
Member
They've been marketing Halo Infinite for two years and you just told me only the hardcore know about the XSX...
Also, in this scenario the X1 can already play it, so why buy a new box?
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Deleted member 775630
Unconfirmed Member
Read through the topic, then you'll understand how wrong you are.
Nikana
Go Go Neo Rangers!
If you dont want to buy a new box then dont. MIcrosoft is happy if you have GP or buy infinite.
I think we have differing opinion on what marketing is. There hasnt been a major push for Infinite yet or either boxes. There arent commercials everywhere, there arent ads.
Dontero
Banned
Sorry but i don't base my knowledge and opinions about hardware on other people opinions.
I base it on my own knowledge i got in over 25 years i follow computer tech.
If xbox lower console in real then next gen baseline will be 4TF not 10TF or 12TF
No developer will design any new technique that will require 5TF to run because they will want to release their games on all consoles not just on one..
It will be pretty similar situation to Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3. Bloodborne was released before Dark Souls 3 and yet Bloodborne looks way better, from texture to geometry, lighting and so on.
Because baseline was not 1,2 but 1,8TF for it.
BurnCoalMeltPole
Member
Or one could say that XSX is just the 4K version of Lockhart, complete with minor enhancements, just like PS4Pro/PS4 or X1X/X1. I suppose games could be optimized for whichever system becomes more common, and then scaled up or down as needed. If $200 separates the two consoles, I would expect Lockhart to sell better and consequently take more of the developer’s time. Now if Lockhart is missing an optical disc drive, that may be a black mark for many potential buyers.
If the software is compelling, and the price is right, the Xboxen should sell okay, but I do not see this strategy taking significant market share from Sony any time soon. It probably will not help sales if the software is also available on PC, making consoles ‘very optional’.
Tulipanzo
Member
See, I thought that showing your hardware and games to people for over two years would result in marketing, but apparently if my nan doesn't catch it during Law and Order Halo:Infinite is fucked!
Nikana
Go Go Neo Rangers!
Uhhh...K
DaGwaphics
Member
I thought it was just me. Some of those "am I having a stroke or is this not English" moments.
Tulipanzo
Member
Why would they want to jump though?
If they cared about next-gen features, Lockhart won't support a lot of them (no 4K, no RT).
They can already play all games that will be on Lockhart, so why are they buying a console at all?
If they were to buy it as a long-term investment, why would they buy the worse and less marketed of two boxes?
Even if they did want it after all that, better hope these price-sensitive folks don't rely on physical sales to boost their library with trade-ins and gifts and used titles.
I've talked to a bunch of people who have GP, sometimes for years, and they all seem way more excited by the XSX than the Lockhart.
In fact, over three forums and various discords, I haven't seen anybody that wants the thing, just talking about hypothetical Lockhart buyers.
My suggestion for GP would be to make a compelling system that people will want to buy as much in year 1 as in year 3, 4 and beyond, and to support it with compelling titles.
Butchering your system to make it cheap so it might appeal to people that want neither next-gen features nor next-gen games is bizarre.
Thirty7ven
Banned
It’s not bizarre at all and matches MS goals of turning Xbox console into just one of the avenues you can get the Xbox service.
A lot of people don’t care about 4K, and RT scales with resolution. And you’re asking “why would they jump?” well shit man, how am I supposed to answer that? Either MS has a compelling product or they don’t.
Honestly I understand why a hardcore Xbox gamer doesn’t like the idea, but it is what it is. Wanting MS to take one for the team and absorb a massive loss on XSX and Gamepass just to win the “console war” against Sony, isn’t just unrealistic, it’s against MS stated goals.
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Tulipanzo
Member
Why make a cheap entry point when all your titles will play on 7 year old hardware?
I know people that don't care about next-gen features, I know people that don't care about games at launch, but I don't know anybody who cares about neither yet wants a system at launch.
Making your main system good, affordable and worthwhile over a gen is a much stronger approach, especially for the price sensitive. All my previous systems were Slim, so I should know.
As I wrote in my previous post, there's plenty of reason to believe 4TF isn't enough, given the direction technology is moving.
Minecraft RT runs at 1080p on XSX, and UE5 is going to reconstruct from lower resolutions, using GPU power to virtualize geometry.
These things just can't work on Lockhart, meaning devs would have to go back to making LODs to try and get games to 1080p; it's far from the quick and easy port people are painting it as.
Furthermore, MS would need to take a massive loss already to get the Lockhart to 299, while undermining their own marketing as "the world's most powerful console". It is just bad tactics.
MS are going with a proper box, and a butchered one, both of which will play the same games as their 7 year old one.
People are theorizing who might want the Lockhart, but I haven't seen anybody care about the idea at all.
Thirty7ven
Banned
Give me your plan then. They have stopped production of Xbox One and Xbox One X, they sold 55 million of those and they aren’t going to sell much more of those. So what happens now? What’s a good tactic in your mind?
The current consoles will be held back by their CPU and SSD, and will only be relevant for the beginning of the new generation, while Lockhart should be able to last the whole generation. I don't see why the selling point is so hard to grasp – play next gen quality games at 1080p. If Nanite can run at 1440p on a 10 TF system, it should be able to run at 900p (upscaled to 1080p) on a 4 TF one. Fully path traced games like Minecraft might require the XSX to run, so Microsoft would have to clearly market the XSX as the RT machine. But path tracing is so demanding that it will likely never be a solution for mainstream titles.
BurnCoalMeltPole
Member
I believe Epic said UE5 automatically generates the appropriate LOD, which is a key part of the engine’s scalability. Whether the resulting quality is acceptable is another matter all together. And since not all aspects of a game are scalable, there will probably be some limitations due to the existence of this low end model. Lockhart/XSX just looks like X1/X1X (I hate these names), and yes, I agree that its existence presents a ‘marketing challenge’ after all of the touting about TF power.
As for the cost of Lockhart, some have suggested that the machine will used binned chips from the XSX wafer (XSX has a sizable monolithic chip). If this is the case, then MS most certainly has another Lockhart design so it can have a dedicated wafer in case the SKU happens to catch on.
Regardless, I agree with you that MS’s strategy has many unappealing aspects, but then again, they are trying to make it easy for consumers to access their GamePass service. We will know a lot more about their value proposition this summer, and it should be pretty clear in a year or so whether their bet has paid off, or they have creatively found yet another way to produce a colossal failure (Xbox OG $4 billion loss, 360 RROD $1 billion loss, X1 Kinect and a massive loss of market share). If the software is truly compelling, no doubt they will have customers.
Tulipanzo
Member
Short version: make compelling hardware (like SeX), price it competitively and release cool games for it. Works for Sony and Nintendo!
Long version:
- Get the XSX close to PS5 in price, and plan discounts well if more expensive so as to not appear obscenely pricey
- Stop calling it stupid fucking names!!! Legit just call the SeX, Scarlet! Your project names are better than your actual names
- Make exclusive games, release them consistently and up the quality
- Market them!!! Barely fucking knew Ori 2 came out, and the average XBox game seemingly goes out of talk in two weeks
- Not every game has to be a service
- Release new IPs and vary it up, it can't just be Halo, Gears and Forza
- Focus on games other people aren't making; Sony has narrative, Nintendo has playfulness, MS should focus on "niche" genres like stealth, horror, action titles or big wordy RPGs imo
- Try and break into markets MS isn't usually in, especially Europe (and maybe inch towards Japan) with your IPs
- When you release new hardware, don't make it overshadow your OG; nobody wants the OG X1 today because the X1S is just better, which kills the used console market
- BC and GP work well, I feel GwG is redundant but whatever
- Keep releasing titles on PC/Switch, but have promising stuff consistently, and never on XBox second (Gears Tactics)
- Obviously Lockhart is canned faster than you can say "Kinect"
I don't think their situation is dire, as they have many studios, promising hardware, and a foothold in the US. I just don't think they've been very exciting this past gen.
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Deleted member 775630
Unconfirmed Member
It's pretty stupid not to learn from other people. What's the point even on being on a forum then? Only to share your own and not learn from others?
Game development is scalable when it comes to rendering. Lower quality assets, and lower resolution doesn't have an influence on the results of high-end systems. PC has been doing this for ages. As long as Lockhart has a similar SSD and CPU there won't be an issue if the GPU is less powerful.
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Tulipanzo
Member
Good post, but have a couple notes.
UE5 effectively dynamically scales the rendered image based on where it is, using top-quality assets. A far away statue gets gradually better as you approach it, eliminating the need for pop-in.
You don't have steps of detail (as with LODs), but a scale of detail as you move farther or closer.
This is however computationally expensive, and games will render at lower than 4K; the higher pixel count and improvements however means that the image is up-scaled losslessly to 4K, well enough to trick DF!
The UE5 demo would push Lockhart sub-1080p, meaning that devs would have to work on bespoke assets for it, essentially working on the game twice and losing out on a lot of UE5 improvements.
I don't buy the binned chip theory. That works for the 5700 and 5700XT, but those are comparable chips (36 vs 40 cus at a higher clock). The Lockhart is much weaker than the XSX.
Admittedly we don't know it's CU count, but would taking likely 56 CU binned chip be cheaper than not using lower CU chips to begin with? Especially as bigger APUs are exponentially pricier? Would it even fit if the APU is much smaller? Are yelds that poor to support a whole new sku by itself?
I sure hope good games are coming, but I feel having to support 5 skus and PC might be stretching their studios too thin.
That and no XSX exclusives with is just disappointing.
Dontero
Banned
You don't need to learn if you already know something.
That is not how baseline works.
Baseline dictates what technology will be used. That technology has minimum requirements. If you don't meet those you can't use that technology.
Good example of that is Global Illumination. It requires a lot of power much more than 4TF to work correctly. So if 4TF console exists then companies won't be able to drop baking shadows and lighting. Because they won't be able to prepare completely 2 kinds of assets, one with baked in shadows and lighting and one without.
Same with raytracing. If company have to make stuff for low power console they can't drop anymore non raytracing solution. Which means automatically that raytracing will become afterthought.
Tulipanzo
Member
PC has a long and proud history of absolutely trashfire ports because devs hadn't optimized properly, even on exponentially more powerful hardware.
Scalability doesn't mean much if devs target the XSX and then cram their game on the Lockhart last minute.
Why would they have to work on bespoke assets? Nanite scales to deliver one triangle per pixel. Less pixels = less geometric load.
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Deleted member 775630
Unconfirmed Member
First party Xbox games go to PC anyway so they already know how to handle minimum requirements. Also thanks to Smart Delivery they can now exactly load in 2 types of assets. Prebaked lighting and without... It just takes a bit more development time.
Tulipanzo
Member
If you have 40% of GPU power of PS5, you need 40% of the pixels (if Nanite even scales there). 40% of 1440p is sub-HD.
I guess they could just run with that, but 900p wouldn't play great in 2020.
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Tulipanzo
Member
That "a bit more" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Also first party XBox games have to run on X1, a system whose CPU is not viable for gaming on PCs. So that's even below that baseline.
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Deleted member 775630
Unconfirmed Member
For 1 year... Let's first see if Sony shows us something tomorrow that wouldn't be possible on the PS4 by just scaling it down. Because everyone keeps saying games will be held back but Microsoft first party has to run on PC anyway so...
Tulipanzo
Member
It was "up to 2 years", though we can be optimistic they realize it's a terrible idea earlier.
The X1 is worse than any PC in some regards, and after 7 years it should be dropped.
Yeah, after the UE5 demo I'm really confident for tomorrow, some of these games have been in the oven for a while.
900p scaled to 1080p via UE5's temporal upscaling. Could still look pretty good.
Tulipanzo
Member
900p XBox for another gen sounds like a bad meme
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Deleted member 775630
Unconfirmed Member
Up to 2 years was said months ago, so by launch we are only talking about 1 year anymore. Although he might've meant to say from launch, we don't really know.
The UE5 demo was build on an engine that hasn't even been released yet. The first UE5 games that actually use all that tech won't come out until the end of 2021 or maybe even 2022. And that is exactly the same time that the Xbox One support is dropped. Who would've thought that Microsoft actually thought through this strategy...
Most launch games (also from 3rd parties) are cross-gen games, and that's not a bad thing. Games are in development for 3-4 years, how long do you think developers would've had the next-gen dev kits? I think not long enough to use the full capabilities of it, which is why cross-gen still makes sense.
Tulipanzo
Member
Yes, really hoping they drop that headass policy, and them not clarifying it hasn't helped.
The UE5 demo was worked on by a couple dozen people for 6 months.
I'm thinking that teams of hundreds working for years might have cooked up something really good looking, same way it has happened every single other console generation.
You are correct though, tomorrow's games won't reach the PS5's full capability.
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Deleted member 775630
Unconfirmed Member
True, but isn't the point of UE5 engine that they work with new technologies that didn't exist yet? So if developers used UE4 for example they won't be able to get that same quality because they aren't using the latest tech yet? But I agree, we'll definitely see some beautiful games tomorrow, I only think that we'll see it on both systems. And that PS games won't necessarily look better purely because first party Xbox games are also developer for the Xbox One.
We'll get our first peek tomorrow, and we will be able to compare them in a month when Microsoft shows their games.
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You could say the same about sub 4K on the next generation systems. What matters is the image quality, not some arbitrary number, and DF already got good results upscaling 540p to 1080p with DLSS 2.0.
Tulipanzo
Member
Emm, UE5 doesn't have a patent on impressive next-gen titles.
Being free to work exclusively on much better hardware will result in a generational jump, as it did every other gen.
Plus, there's more, but we've already seen XBox games. Halo: Infinite, HB2 and Inside XBox games are good points of comparison for tomorrow. Those and the X1-based enhanced titles, since the X1, as you said, will still be supported.
Tulipanzo
Member
DLSS 2.0 in that DF video is working on a card significantly more powerful than Lockhart, and XBox and AMD's solution "will be relying on the raw throughput of the GPU". Here's hoping we can reconstruct to 1080p! Next-gen baby
900p in 2020 is sure to go down a treat.