Xbox Series S was created to make next-gen accessible amid rising manufacturing costs

Microsoft surprised a lot of gamers this week when they announced the low $299 price of the Xbox Series X. In a leaked upcoming update video, Xbox boss Phil Spencer revealed that the console manufacturer’s goal was always to make next-gen accessible.

In an upcoming video update leaked by Twitter user WalkingCat, Xbox boss Phil Spencer explained the goal behind the Xbox Series S.

“[We have] the only next generation consoles with next-gen performance, speed and compatibility accessible to everyone and, as people know, accessibility has been a really important thing for us,” Spencer explained.

“And price matters in an accessible form factor. All of these things were critical, so we’ve already talked about Xbox Series X, but people have been asking about Lockhart [Xbox Series] for a long time. It’s kind of the worst kept secret in our portfolio.”

This mindset was further explained by Xbox Head of Platform Engineering and Hardware, Liz Hamren. With Moore’s Law of increasing technology costs still in effect, Hamren revealed that the Xbox Series S was designed to combat how expensive creating hardware has become.

“What we saw in prior generations was that cost was really preventing some gamers from joining early in the generation. And when we looked at trends in Silicon and hardware costs in this generation, we saw that we weren’t going to see the kinds of decreasing costs that we saw in prior generations,” Hamren explained.

That led us to realize that we could deliver a fully next-gen accessible console at the beginning of a generation, and when we were building this, we also realized that a number of our customers cared more about frame rate than they did about resolution. So we realized we didn’t have to require a 4K TV for this console,” Hamren continued, explaining the console’s 1440p target output.

“We also learned that a number of players, especially new players, expect their games to come with them across all of their devices, and so we made the Xbox series as all digital and by making it all digital, that was one of the things that allowed us to get to this smallest sleekest Xbox ever.”