Microsoft, Announce the Xbox Series S Already (Premium)

2020 has been unusual for a number of obvious reasons, but the video gaming world has been held captive for months as Sony and Microsoft warily circle each other with their respective next-generation video game console announcements. The stakes are high: Microsoft lost the current-generation, and decisively, in part because of massive marketing and go-to-market mistakes from which it never recovered, and neither firm wants to self-victimize itself by making the same mistakes this time around.

But that reality has led to the silliest launch year antics we’ve ever experienced. Robbed of in-person events like E3 at which these companies traditionally bare all in an orgasmic ritual that dates back to the early 1990s, Sony and Microsoft have instead been dribbling out information carefully and in small doses. But this collective tentativeness just highlights how insecure each is about its product lines, and it leaves a leadership gap that I’m sure Nintendo is all too eager to fill.

I’m a bit more interested in what Microsoft is doing, frankly, so I’ll focus on the software giant here. But make no mistake, Sony, with its scattershot approach to launching the PlayStation 5, and it’s utter silence on a true game streaming service, is just as rudderless.

Microsoft’s year of stupidity has revealed itself in many forms over time, from an introduction to Halo: Infinity that was so lackluster I can’t believe Microsoft went public with it to an unwinnable war with Apple over getting Project xCloud into the iPhone App Store. But the biggest transgression, by far, has been its mishandling of the reveal of its next-generation consoles. Right, I wrote consoles. Because there are two of them.

You’d never know that from Microsoft’s public missives, of course. To date, the firm has only acknowledged the Xbox Series X, a high-end console that will offer a consistent quality of 4K/60 fps and will replace the Xbox One X in the market. But what Microsoft has never publicly discussed is a lower-end and less expensive version of the console called the Xbox Series S that will replace the Xbox One S, currently Microsoft’s best-selling console.

This is dumb on a number of levels, the most obvious being that Sony has already announced both of its consoles already: The firm will ship one PlayStation 5 model with an optical drive and one without, and the lower-end version will of course cost less. (Sony, like Microsoft, has yet to discuss pricing. More on that in a moment.)

Worse, we’ve known about the Xbox Series S for almost two years: Brad first revealed the existence of the second next-generation Xbox console, codenamed Lockhart, in December 2018.

“Lockhart … is an ‘arcade’ version of Anaconda [the higher-end console],” he wrote at the time. “Microsoft refers to Anaconda as Scarlett Pro and Lockhart as Scarlett Arcade. Think of Lockhart as the successor to the Xbox One S, whereas Anaconda is the successor to the Xbox One X.”

Bingo. Exactly right.

Despite this, Brad has been harassed by some Xbox fans and even some bloggers because Microsoft has only announced the one console, the Xbox Series X. And yet, over time, more and more evidence has emerged to prove that he was right all along. There was the developer documentation from this past June. That leaked controller whose packaging mentioned the Xbox Series S early last month. And now, the ultimate proof: A publicly shipping Xbox One Controller notes that it is compatible with various Xbox One models, plus Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

Obviously, Xbox Series S is real. Microsoft just needs to announce it. Should have already done so.

The issue, I think, is that both Sony and Microsoft are being particularly cautious about the most important and most damaging thing that killed Xbox One before it even launched: The price. When Xbox One launched at $500, a full $100 more than PlayStation 4 thanks to the unnecessary inclusion of a superfluous Kinect peripheral that Microsoft would quietly kill off a year later, its fate was sealed. So this year, neither company wants to land at a more expensive price point.

Sony has survived this kind of thing in the past, however: Thanks to its Blu-ray drive, the PlayStation 3 was more expensive than the DVD-based Xbox 360 in the previous generation of consoles. And Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 for several years as a result. But by the time that generation wound down, the PS3 had eked out a small victory over the Xbox 360. Overall, it sold better.

But the margin of defeat for the Xbox One has been much greater. And with video game fans having less and less reason to even upgrade to a new console, thanks in part to the emergence of compelling cloud-based gaming services that are hardware agnostic, the stakes are much higher. And two things are very clear. Neither company wants to announce next-generation pricing first. And both will quickly reduce whatever pricing they planned, if needed, should the other announce first.

Whatever. It’s time for both companies to play their respective hands, announce pricing, and, in Microsoft’s case, unleash the worst-kept secret in gaming: Microsoft has two next-generation consoles ready to go. And we’ve know this all along.