Better Developer Support
Microsoft announced Project Scorpio at E3 2016 with a few tech specs and a whole lot of ideas on how people will play games in the future. The company announced the console publicly to give developers time to make sure their games can work with the new hardware by the time it launches sometime around Holiday 2017.
Microsoft’s ethos for Xbox is to have one game library across whatever system you play on. That is why the company has been pushing Xbox 360 backwards compatibility because buying new hardware does not have to mean sacrificing your old games.
Sony was able to court developers for the PlayStation 4 Pro and had almost 40 games with enhanced support at launch, though there were some games that ran worse and needed a few more updates. All Xbox One games will work on the Scorpio, but Microsoft needs a wider depth of titles that support the new HDR and native 4K features of the new system.
Better 4K TV Compatibility
Imagine buying a new console, hooking it up to your 4K television, and receiving no picture. Are all the connections and settings right? Does the console need an update to work with this specific television? Does the television need an update to work with the console?
Just taking a look at this PS4 Pro troubleshooting thread can give you a headache by how many things could go wrong. Microsoft needs to avoid these compatibility problems with Project Scorpio. The Xbox One S had its problems with HDR and 4K televisions at launch, but it was fixed by a firmware update and was not as widespread as the PS4 Pro. 4K televisions are not in their infancy, but 4K and HDR adoption will be slow if the televisions are hard to work with new technology.
Start with a 2 TB Hard Drive
The PS4 Pro comes standard with a 1 TB hard drive, while the Xbox One S is available in 500 GB, 1 TB, and a limited supply of 2 TB models. Depending on who you ask, 1 TB may not be enough to hold a lot of games at one time without constant memory management. Somebody who buys one or two games a year may not feel the burn as someone who buys ten games a year.
While the PS4 Pro supports installing your own hard drive and the Xbox One S supports external storage, a bigger, included hard drive would be ahead of the trend that is rising game file sizes. Last Fall saw high profile releases with inflated file sizes. For example, Forza Horizon 3 needed up to 60 GB, Gears of War 4 required up to 85 GB, and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was up to 120 GB (included Modern Warfare Remastered pack-in and season pass content).
Project Scorpio could still be sold with different hard drive sizes, but a base level of 2 TB would be better than spending another $80 to $100 for an external drive that can only be used for the console or dealing with opening the PS4 Pro to stick a better internal drive in there.
Price
Currently, Sony is selling two models of its PlayStation 4. There is the PS4 Slim, which is the original PS4 in a smaller package, bundled with a game for $299, and the more powerful PS4 Pro at $399. Sony learned its lesson about pricing competitively after selling the PlayStation 3 for more than $500 at launch, which consumers balked at and former Sony CEO Jack Tretton admitted was not the best idea.
Microsoft cannot make the same mistake with Project Scorpio, but it would have to provide a darn great reason if the starting price is $499. Head of Xbox Phil Spencer admitted Scorpio would “feel like it’s a premium product,” and was designed almost “in parallel” with the Xbox One S to make a price versus performance comparison easier. Still, a $399 or $449 price for Scorpio would be extremely competitive if the console is much more powerful than the PS4 Pro.
Communication
Microsoft already made the first impression of Project Scorpio at E3 2016, claiming it would be the “most powerful console ever,” but the company needs to continue communicating to its audience why this console is necessary when it is positioning itself between the Xbox One S and a Windows 10 PC. Is it worth upgrading from an original Xbox One when both can play the same games? How powerful is the console compared to building my own PC?
You can expect more information to be shared at this year’s E3, but Microsoft should hold its own event closer to the console’s scheduled release date of Holiday 2017. Sony held its PlayStation Meeting conference last September, two months before the PS4 Pro released, showing off the hardware and software in extreme detail. The difference Microsoft should make is showing more side-by-side comparisons of games in original and 4K resolution because a live stream cannot do the graphics justice due to compressed video and bandwidth.
There’s definitely some work for Microsoft in the coming months, but thankfully they have an example to pull valuable lessons from. We can only wait to see what they’ve truly learned when Project Scorpio finally reaches fans later this year.
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