Microsoft Says Xbox One X Couldn’t Achieve True 4K at $399

This year at E3, we learned the name and specs of Microsoft's Project Scorpio: The Xbox One X. The price sits at $499, which is arguably a lot of money. Microsoft has since stated that the $500 price point was needed in order to achieve "True 4K".

In an interview with Polygon at E3 this year, Mike Ybarra, Corporate VP of Xbox and Windows Gaming, explained that the Xbox One X could have been priced lower, but it would have been an inferior product.

"When we looked at the overall design, we could do less memory. We could do under-clocked components so we don’t have to have the cooling system that we have in here. There’s any number of things you could think of.

This is designed for the premium gamer that wants the absolute best experience. And so compromising any of those then makes that message much harder to communicate to them. We showed them the smallest Xbox we’ve ever created, the most power, the best price per performance you can get anywhere, in this box. That’s what we’re delivering.

I think if you start taking away some of those items, people will say, ‘Well, what were your goals?’ And that’s an area that we don’t want that confusion to exist.

[at $399] we wouldn’t have been able to usher in 4K to the living room, and that was a design pillar for this box. There’s lots of goals in the program, from compatibility to everything. But one, let’s really usher in true 4K where developers don’t have to think about, ‘Wow, how do we stretch this and make it really work?’ We needed to deliver that to consumers. They asked us for uncompromised true 4K in the living room. And so we leveraged a lot of PC technology, from the cooling, the power management system that’s in this, to get it this small — while managing acoustics. That was the goal."

Despite some gamer's negative reaction to the price tag of the Xbox One X, Big Boss Phil Spencer himself stated that the premium console won't be netting a profit, but will be banking on game sales to turn one over.

Is $499 too much? Take a look at our compiled list of games for the console before you decide!