At last, one of the giants has crumbled. Microsoft has officially announced the rough release date (maybe November 10th?) and price for one of its upcoming consoles, the Xbox Series S.
The Series S is both the smallest and probably cheapest modern Xbox ever. Xbox’s Twitter account officially shared this image, which displays a price tag of $299. That’s £249 in the UK.
👀 Let’s make it official!
Xbox Series S | Next-gen performance in the ˢᵐᵃˡˡᵉˢᵗ Xbox ever. $299 (ERP).
Looking forward to sharing more! Soon. Promise. pic.twitter.com/8wIEpLPVEq
— Xbox (@Xbox) September 8, 2020
It should be noted that this is the smaller of the two next-gen Xbox consoles. The Series S is much smaller than the Series X, its big-brother counterpart. It’s also digital-only (no disk drive) and features an absolutely enormous fan on the top.
The console is supposedly also available as part of a finance plan of around $25 a month (there is no European price available as of yet.) This includes paying for the console while also covering the cost of Xbox Live and the Game Pass.
Both the Xbox Series S and Series X will release side-by-side and some leaked videos spurred Xbox to make an official announcement earlier today. The video showed a size comparison between the S and the X, and the difference is pretty massive.
The leaked video also goes into detail about some of the specs of the console, including its support of up to 120 frames per second at 1440p (wow), 4k upscaling for various games, and 512gb of storage at its base level.
Despite these impressive stats, the Series S will likely have weaker processing power than the current Xbox One X. However, the new Series S will still be able to run any of the next-gen titles arriving later this year and early into 2021.
Its counter-part, the full-power Xbox Series X, will outstrip its performance by quite some way, potentially having twice the processing power as the current Xbox One X.
Microsoft has been surprisingly quiet about the release of its flagship console, and Sony has been equally quiet about theirs.
Microsft has stated that there will be thousands of games available to play at launch, with support for older generation games and new next-gen titles arriving this Autumn and early 2021 (including Halo: Infinite).
Sony also has plans to release two versions of its PlayStation 5 with a similar price model, although no dates or specs have been leaked about these upcoming consoles. With such a low price for the Series S, Sony may have to reduce their own costs to stay competitive.
