It’s no secret that the launch of the Xbox One was shaky, which had a lot to do with the poor reveal of the console at E3 2013. The company has done a lot since then to try and right the ship, with reducing the price and adding the highly-successful backwards compatibility program being very successful. There’s more to be done, however, and the company looks to do that with Project Scorpio.
Corporate VP of Xbox and Windows, Mike Ybarra, has sounded off on how he hopes that Project Scorpio will reestablish the relationship that they had with developers during the Xbox 360 generation. He said “The team looked back at developers and the developer relationship we have. With Xbox 360 we had the absolute best platform for developers, [with Xbox One] we sort of lost that in a two-year time-frame, so we said how do we win the mind-share of those developers back? We want the best games running on our box and there are tools, devkits and some arrows like that to win the developers back. So that was a big priority for us as we approached this product.”
He goes on to discuss the launch of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, revealing that the PlayStation 4’s superior power compared to Xbox One caused many developers to be more keen to develop for Sony’s console. However, with Project Scorpio’s specs being vastly superior even when compared with the PlayStation 4 Pro, this is a trend that they hope will change very soon. “We have to win the hearts and minds of developers,” said Ybarra. “We have to have the right toolset that lets them bring out their games across the whole family of products and let them create the absolute best versions of those games.”
Ybarra also discussed the mindset that the team had when making the Scorpio, intending to create a device with enough of a difference compared to Xbox One to make consumers want to own it. He said that “When we see consumers tell us they want the latest technology [and] experience more frequently to our traditional console business that doesn’t really align with that, you have to pause, you have to take some pretty big risks.”
While we now know how powerful Project Scorpio will be, we’re still waiting on the console’s official name, price and release date. These are things that we are likely to hear from Microsoft around this year’s E3, which will take place in June.
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