Microsoft unveils Xbox Series S with $299 price tag
Microsoft has responded to recent reports, officially unveiling the Xbox Series S with a $299 retail price in the U.S. The company states the next-generation console comes in its “smallest” footprint to date, with more details to come “soon.”
It has long been rumored that Microsoft is working on two Xbox consoles for next-gen, aiming to claim both ends of the market. And now, we can confirm indeed that the pricing scheme should be very familiar, matching that of the Xbox One X and Xbox One S of yesteryear.
We can confirm via our sources that the entry-level Xbox Series S will cost $299 at retail, with a $25 per month Xbox All Access financing option, which Microsoft is planning to push hard via various retailers and a large global rollout. The more powerful Xbox Series X will cost $499, with a $35 per month Xbox All Access financing option.
Both consoles will launch on November 10, 2020.
The Xbox Series S just leaked (via Brad Sams), giving us a glimpse at Microsoft’s entry-level next-gen SKU. The Xbox Series S is small enough to fit inside an Xbox Series X, and we expect it to be around 4TF RDNA2, making it roughly around as powerful as the Xbox One X, perhaps geared towards 1080p monitors with better frame rates. We don’t have further details on the console’s capabilities beyond that, but we expect NVME drives, and many of the newer “next-gen” features like fast resuming multiple games, and ray tracing.
— WalkingCat (@_h0x0d_) September 8, 2020
The Xbox Series X is a 12TF beast of a console that will boast 4K resolution and 60 FPS as standard, with some games, like Halo Infinite, going all the way up to 120 FPS in multiplayer.
The prices Microsoft have put forward for the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X put them firmly in-line with the Xbox One S and Xbox One X, and it will be interesting to see how Sony prices the competing PlayStation 5 in response. Microsoft has committed to bringing the entire Xbox One game library, including backwards compatible Xbox 360 games forward to the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X, and your best Xbox One headset and all of your other accessories “will just work” on the next-gen systems as well.
Microsoft will push Xbox All Access financing far more broadly than it did this gen, which was seen as a bit of a pilot program. We’re expecting Xbox All Access to roll out to far more markets than it did previously, and we also expect the Xbox Series consoles to gun for a global simultaneous launch in all existing Xbox markets, rather than the slow rollout we saw for the Xbox One in 2013.
