Xbox Project Scorpio 4k Gaming And Supersampling 1080p

Honestly, I kind of think Scorpio is DOA, really. They've sold half as many units as the PS4 and have been on the market for over 3 years. Their 2017 lineup of exclusives is pretty weak and they're getting more attention for their cancelled games than their announced ones. I don't see the release of a premium console that requires a premium entertainment setup (4K and HDR haven't gotten mainstream adoption yet) while in the midst of a losing generation to be a good idea.

MS will stick with it for this generation but they're already turning the Xbox brand into a platform across multiple devices (like the PC crossbuy stuff and their $10/month subscription for games that also works on PC) rather than focusing on just console hardware. The Scorpio was announced way too early with way too few details and is coming out way too late. In another 2 years, Sony will probably announce or release their new hardware and MS will have gone from a half step ahead to a half step (or more) behind, except without the momentum of any great hardware sales behind them.

Currently I do not game on my home theater set up and have not owned a game council since Sega Genisis. For me part of it is financial right now and it is taking everything to upgrade my home theater and try to also purchase movies and trying to also purchase vinyl records. Also the other part is I would rather game on my pc than game on a council. Gaming councils have come a long way and the graphics keep improving but so do pc's. And since I do not care for the loading mechanism on the gaming councils and do not stream movies very often I prefer to use standard components and not game councils. But this is my preference and I am sure there are those who love gaming on the councils and use them for streaming movies and are very happy with them. Oh last thing is I refuse to pay to play multi player games online so there goes gaming councils. Not saying I will never get a gaming council again because there are some great games that are not available for pc and the only way to play them is on a council. So if my finances take a huge turn for the better then I honestly could end up with a X Box or Playstation you never know but it would basically be for games only.

Morgan Jolley said:

Honestly, I kind of think Scorpio is DOA, really. They've sold half as many units as the PS4 and have been on the market for over 3 years.

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Since they stop reporting how many consoles they sell in 2014 your just using the industry guessing. However they have always been outsold by Sony. I don't think that means they are DOA. Plus there Windows 10 / Xbox cross platform gaming is a big part of there sales these days.

I'm pretty excited with what Scorpio could be we will have to wait and see. I have the Xbox One S and really enjoy upscaled 1080/HDR gaming now. Looks fantastic on my 85" 4K TV. I game quite a bit and have been a XBOX gamer since day one. Dabbled in the PS3 but in the end never used it for anything other then a blu-ray player, never could get used to the controller. I sold it when I got an Oppo blu-ray player. So I'll admit that I'm a XBOX fan but I'm impressed with the games Sony comes out with just can't use the controller so it will never be in my house.

I don't get the thing about not being able to use a PS controller as opposed to the XBOX controller. They all work, fundamentally, the same way. The PS3 controller did feel a bit small and lightweight, but that was easy to get used to. The redesigned PS4 controller actually feels ergonomically more comfortable than the XBOX1 controller, but neither controller is hard to get used to.

Besides the controller, what is the real difference between an Xbox One and a PS4, or even Xbox 360 and PS3? The OS' are a bit different and the online stuff is what it is, but the only real difference is the games. If you're playing multiplatform games then there's barely a difference. Look at the exclusives, the real reasons why you get specifically an MS or Sony product.

The Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 for years. Sony eventually caught up once both had hit like 80 million units. But right now, Sony is kind of sweeping the floor with MS, even compared to history. MS also doesn't report Xbox console sales anymore because they want to focus on areas with constant revenue (which is why report game unit sales and Xbox Live subscriptions).

The crossbuy stuff between Xbox One and PC is great for consumers, but actually kind of incentivizes people to just play on their PCs. Especially if you already have a decently powerful computer, there's no reason to get an Xbox One.

The industry "guesses" on hardware sales put Xbox One at 26 million units. Sony is over 53 million units. I don't believe that the Xbox One number is very far off from the reality.

But why does that make the Xbox DOA? 26M units is a fair number given the gaming industry in general is starting to slide. However, the gaming business is ~3% of Microsoft's business so the fact they haven't left the console world yet proves they feel it is a good play for them.

As far as the controller goes it is smaller then the xbox controller which aggravates my carpel tunnel. Much like lots of things they would have all there buttons mapped differently then the xbox which would mess me up. That aside I probably just never played it enough to get used to it. So there is my reason like it or not.

In the end it will be interesting to see how Scorpio does. I think sales will do well but I'm not expecting it to out sell the PSx because they have quite the fanboy base. Plus, I think really screwed up the Xbox One release and that killed their chances to be the leader. Way too may defections but I think they are doing well in the home device market and the Scorpio could be a fantastic device in the 4K world. This could be the last console MS makes. I do think the console market in general is starting to fade because the console generation is getting old. Kids like mine are moving back to the PC again.

I never said MS was doing poorly as a company because of the Xbox, but the fact that the Xbox One isn't doing so hot and it only makes up ~3% of the company is good reason why they may be considering to kill it off, or at least kill off dedicated hardware. The XBO and PS4 are basically mid-range PCs at this point, so MS turning Xbox into a brand and a service makes sense.

I don't think 26M units is a relative success, even though there's more time to go in this generation and MS is clearly turning some sort of profit from the brand. Honestly, were it not for the absolute commercial failure of the Wii U (13M units in 4.5 years) then the Xbox One would be a huge failure. The PS3 did better against the 360 than the One is doing against the PS4 and was considered the loser for most of the last generation.

I don't hate everything. I've actually been loving Zelda quite a lot lately.

The single biggest difference between the PS3 and the 360 was the lack of Blu-Ray playback in the latter, in my opinion.

It wasn't felt so much early on when it looked like HD-DVD stood a chance again Blu-Ray, but when that quickly failed, the 360 didn't have a counterpoint to that feature and HD streaming hadn't yet become all that viable to fill the gap in any meaningful way. Otherwise, as both a PS3/360 fan from early in their lifespan, they were pretty much even in almost every conceivable way, right on down to the final sales figures for each platform (~90 million units sold, each).

Where is this 3% jazz coming from? In their 2016 annual report for example, they reported $85.3 billion in revenue, with over 11% of that attributed to the Xbox. That's far more substantial than 3%, and one of the most glowing bits in the entire report if you scan it was the sizable increase in active Xbox Live subscriptions, with a 33% increase from 12 months before.

Morgan has been underselling Microsoft's performance since I first visited this corner of the Home Theater Forum. For a long time, he was quite insistent that they hadn't even made any money off it until very recently, when in reality they've had a profitable console business for a decade now, after quickly turning the corner with the 360 very early in its lifespan.

I imagine the Xbox One is basically a success. After a rough start of their own making that dug a pretty deep hole, they've done a nice job recovering.

The 360 and PS3 were comparable in every way? Really? Did the 360 support 3D Blu because I cannot recall it doing so? How about lossless tracks?

The PS3 far outstripped the 360 as a multi media machine.

I don't see why I had to even spell that out about 3D Blu-Ray when I started out by saying that the single biggest difference between the PS3 and the 360 that I'd otherwise agree with Morgan about being pretty much comparable, "was the lack of Blu-Ray playback in the latter".

That rather encompasses 3D Blu-Ray support, wouldn't you say? Either way, even if one doesn't agree that they were very comparable systems with minor strengths and weaknesses over the other, it's rather unimportant to the conversation.

Morgan is right, it's the different exclusives that really differentiates the Xbox One and Playstation 4 experience today, since so much of it otherwise is a close match between the two.

When you claim that the two machines were virtually interchangeable by stating that the differences were "minor" then I'm going to challenge that. There was nothing minor about the 360s lack of Blu ray and lossless audio support.

The machines were not comparable as convergence devices. The PS3 far outstripped the 360 as a multi media device in a home theater environment.

Almost the exact opposite occurred with the XBOX1 and PS4 roll out.

90 million people bought the Xbox 360 and another 90 million bought PS3 (overlap for re-buys after hardware broke, not counted). I doubt whether or not one or the other played MP3s or 3D BluRays or HD-DVDs made a big difference. The PS2 sold incredibly well because it played DVDs but I don't think multimedia function was as big of a feature in the PS3/360 generation.

I didn't say MS didn't turn a profit until recently. But I did say that the entire Xbox (original first console) was a loss (and planned that way) and they started to turn a profit on the Xbox division a couple years into the 360's life. That ended up turning into a net loss again when the RRoD issue popped up and they offered to fix all Xbox 360s with the issue for free. Since then, they have become profitable again.

I even said that I'd be willing to guess they're profitable on the Xbox One. But they've only sold 26M units in 3.5 years while their primary competition has more than doubled that. Remember that the Xbox One launched at $100 more than PS4 and with Kinect 2 packed in. Remember that the Xbox One was dogged by the reality that it was ever-so-slightly less powerful than the PS4 at launch (but sitll close enough that the experience is basically the same on both).

With Scorpio, MS is trying to adopt the next step of the cell phone upgrade strategy that Sony started with PS4 Pro. Incremental updates that are fully backward compatible and games being made to run efficiently on more than one device. It's a half step to the next generation whereas the PS4 Pro was a quarter step. The problem is that the Xbox One isn't doing well enough to revitalize the brand but its also way too early to release a full-fledged successor.

According to VGChartz, the Xbox One is less than 400k units ahead of the 360 in life-to-date-equivalent sales: http://www.vgchartz.com/article/267662/xbox-one-vs-xbox-360vgchartz-gap-chartsjanuary-2017-update/

Extracting some numbers out, it looks like the PS4 is outselling the PS3 at this point in it's life by something like 20 million units: http://www.vgchartz.com/article/267...aligned-sales-comparison-january-2017-update/

The lead Sony has right now is staggering. (And actually, if you remove the 1 year head-start, month-by-month sales of PS3 vs. 360 over their lifetime have Sony ahead. Releasing Xbox One and PS4 at the same time hurt MS a lot.)

I'm a console gamer and I use my PS3/PS4 in my home theater. Games look fantastic projected 1080p on my 106" screen, and I couldn't imagine having to go back to a TV to play them.

That said, I'm not too interested in 4k gaming, simply because I don't have the means to play games in 4k. A 4k projector won't be in my budget any time soon, and like I said, I wouldn't want to downsize to a TV just for 4k gaming.

However, I'm very surprised by comments in here about the console gaming market slipping. I don't have any industry information to go off of, but personally for me it feels like one of the strongest console gaming time ever. So many amazing games coming out and now that tons of indies are publishing to consoles, my gaming backlog is getting so huge I couldn't keep up unless I quit my job and got divorced.

This is a pretty good time to be a console gamer, but competition from outside forces (PCs, tablets/phones) is sort of hurting the traditional console market. The PS4 and Xbox One are selling better than their predecessors but the market of "gamers" is also greatly expanded and now includes people who used to or might have bought consoles but now just play on mobile devices. More money is being made in games but it's just coming from many more sources.

You kind of hit on a huge point regarding 4K gaming: the public isn't ready for it yet. It's cool that it exists but not enough people have 4K TVs that are just calling for a native-4K console. That's partially why I found it bizarre that people were so upset with Sony for not putting a 4K BluRay player in the PS4 Pro. There were literally a handful of movies in the format and not enough people owned the TVs.

Jeff Cooper said:

However, I'm very surprised by comments in here about the console gaming market slipping. I don't have any industry information to go off of, but personally for me it feels like one of the strongest console gaming time ever.

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I'm puzzled by that statement too. The Switch had the best console launch ever for Nintendo, and the PS4 is a dream come true for Sony. I think if anything gaming has become more of an accepted pastime/way of life than ever before.

I don't think it is bizarre at all that people were upset at the lack of a 4K player in the Pro. It just shows that Sony has gone back to doing stupid shit.

I would considered upgrading to a Pro if Sony had had the brains to create an all round system like they did with the PS3. As it stands, the Pro is such an incremental upgrade that it isn't worth spending money on.

I would look at an upgrade to Scorpio if I knew that it would support more than just 4K gaming.

The present and near-term future of 4K content resides heavily in gaming or streaming video, not physical disc media. Why would Sony increase the cost to make the PS4 Pro by adding in a 4K drive for content that doesn't exist? Especially considering they're doing exceptionally well without it?

I mean, besides the fact that you personally want it, what business sense is there in doing it?

Your assertion that no 4K physical media is available is wrong. Blu ray media was pretty skimpy when the PS3 came out. That didn't stop them from putting a Blu-ray player into the machine.

Not putting a 4K player into the Pro made the machine not worth buying for an incremental increase in power. Might as well wait for the next gen which will probably copy Nintendo's Switch strategy, but with a lot more juice.

Anyway, we got off track here since this is supposed to be about Scorpio which is more than a tiny incremental upgrade than either the 1S or Pro.