It's all about immersion these days. The days of performance, graphics and games are no longer "in".
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Casuals and especially casual parents don't know what gamepass is and are the type to not want to buy a external ssd cause of the small early gen size 500gb nor do they like the idea of digital only.
That's a different market.
For example my boy is buying a XSX for himself and a XSS for his lady but he knows what GP is and understands the need to buy a external SSD. He is the type this will cater to.
The casual TV watcher didn't know what Netflix was in it's first few years of existence. They didn't know what Halo was in 2001, COD was in 2005 or what Fortnite was 1 month after it launched. Things change. Marketing for new products and services like this generally focus on enthusiast first. Then it's easier to drive mindshare to casual market when they change marketing strategies later.
The SSD space is relative. Most gamers buying the S will only need 1080P assets, not the 1440P ones. You'll likely fit more 1080P games on a 500GB SSD drive than you will 4K games on today's 1TB One X drive. Next gen games will also have smaller footprints. Games stored on HDD drives need a lot more repeated assets.
We also can't forget about the regular Xbox fan/gamer. The guy or girl who usually moves to next gen 2 to years in once pricing hits a mainstream sweet spot. This will speed up adoption of a baseline that includes SSD throughput, Zen 2 CPUs and ML capable hardware. For the gamer who already is comfortable with Xbox and will eventually get a new Xbox but it's just a matter of when. If this thing is $249 next Black Friday, you'll see a lot of people move over quicker which will be better for devs targeting faster I/O and CPU speeds for game design. Assuming COD in 2021 is next gen only, something like Series S will be a significant seller.
We can not compare it to netflix until it's on all devices.
Casuals barely know Halo. Fortnite is in another league of success and popularity than Halo.
You can compare them. You can compare it's trajectory. People seem to forget that Netflix was only on PC for the first few years. 10 million is a significant mindshare tipping point. It hit that this year. Once adoption in gaming is around 20 million, mainstream knows about it. I'm expecting Game Pass to be there by late 2021 post Halo's launch.
That's assuming it takes off and for the sake of not arguing we will just have to see.
Great way to sell your proprietary SSD's though which jack up the cost over time. You can still store and play older gen games from a traditional external HDD or SSD though and I'm guessing it'll be just like the PS5 where you can store PS5 games on external storage and then swap them back and forth on the internal SSD when you want to play them.
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Netflix began in 2007. In 2009 it started streaming to Xbox 360. It took 4 years to hit over 20 million subscribers. In 2013 it had it's first major Netflix exclusive with House of Cards.
Game Pass started mid 2017. It wasn't until 2018 that the announced new games would be coming to the service. In should easily surpass 20 million subscribers by the end of 2021 and have it's first House of Card's equivalent with Halo Infinite. The 10 million number they gave was reflective of pre-pandemic. They got a lucky pandemic boost since then. They will package Game Pass Ultimate in their All Access program for new console sales. The PC Game Pass is still in beta and cloud Game Pass hasn't started yet. Also:
Game Pass started mid 2017. It wasn't until 2018 that the announced new games would be coming to the service. In should easily surpass 20 million subscribers by the end of 2021 and have it's first House of Card's equivalent with Halo Infinite. The 10 million number they gave was reflective of pre-pandemic. They got a lucky pandemic boost since then. They will package Game Pass Ultimate in their All Access program for new console sales. The PC Game Pass is still in beta and cloud Game Pass hasn't started yet. Also:
- Microsoft's studio purchases should start to turn original Xbox console and streaming exclusive content in 2022
- 5G will hit critical mass around 2023
- The gaming industry is already driving more revenue than Hollywood and is expected to widen that gap in the next 5 years
Games don't run off of discs anymore- Discs are too slow to read off of. It's all installed on your HDD. It's only there for DRM. Hell in the age huge of Day one patches, It's not even worth installing from...
I'm pretty sure they said you can plug in your regular external, but to play the new games they'd have to be moved to the SSD.
It really does seem like a great move by MS. Design a machine that still brings the same gaming experience at a lower cost by simply designing it around lower resolutions. When you consider just how much more power(and thus the expense of tech to achieve it) high resolutions require, it's pretty genius..
I'm really hoping the SSDs will result in smaller file sizes because they don't need to duplicate assets anymore.
Sony themselves have focused on this with their 825GB storage for 4K assets. Can't forget that Sony has a digital only version and their exclusives tend to be open world games with high quality assets. Whatever narrative that's worked against the Series S 500GBs for 1080P assets will work against the PS5 as well.
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As an aside, expect more info to release soon. Microsoft, for better or worse, wanted to have a build up of new info closer to launch this time. From pretty good sources they held a lot back in July. Not just the Initiative's game. This was all supposed to start next week but now the damn broke. Might hear more this week.
Nice. Neat Video.
Textures take up SOOO much space. This is where VRS comes in. If they only have to have one LOD that is pulled in in parts, that would take up waaay less space too. That's good for storage AND RAM.
Not only THAT, but having dynamic lights and not baking, then you don't have to store multiple versions of textures and light data. Crazy how that stuff stacks up.
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Graphics dev commenting on the S:
This sounds really legit honestly. In line with some of the comments I've seen from devs responding to the leaks previously. (Not from anyone actually working on it because none of them will say anything to break NDA).
Basically everything that is lowered in the Series S is in proportion to the resolution. Like the CPU is clocked a little lower, memory bandwidth is less and storage is less but it's in proportion to the resolution and texture sizes. There should be no differences in game design. Only resolution (which encompasses textures since you don't need 4K versions) and lighting.
The dev is 100% right.
Yeah, nah! I'm gonna need the REAL devs to chime in on this one.
Valerie, Jessica?
...s***! I mean, Val, Jinca?? School deez fools please! Fvck this...
For real though; anyone else see Microsoft coming into its own with the announcement of the Series S. The full picture is really starting to come into view. And its really solid.
Valerie, Jessica?
...s***! I mean, Val, Jinca?? School deez fools please! Fvck this...
For real though; anyone else see Microsoft coming into its own with the announcement of the Series S. The full picture is really starting to come into view. And its really solid.
I mean who here REALLY thought that the XSS would hold back anything?
The thing has pretty much the same CPU in the XSX and a slightly weaker GPU/RAM setup.
I mean a Subaru WRX is going to go from 0-60 in a certain amount of time. However, the WRX STI will get there faster. Same body on both, but one has more horsepower to throw down.
Same principal with the XSS/XSX.
Mid-gen refresh.
Contingency plan in light of the Nvidia 3000 series and what AMD has in store for the PC GPU space.
I'd bet money on that.
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