Microsoft’s Project Scorpio officially isn’t competing with gaming PCs, will have a console price

The price of Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One console, codenamed, Project Scorpio, for the time being, has been a point of discussion ever since the device was first announced. Scorpio has to have high enough specs to make it worth investing in for its hardcore gamer target audience, but it also needs to hit a price point that will make it a realistic purchase for them and make it a profitable venture for Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Phil Spencer recently spoke with AusGamers about the company’s plans for Project Scorpio and the conflict they’re encountering when trying to balance power with price. “You want a platform that is balanced between memory bandwidth, GPU power, you know, your ability to move memory and [an] amount of memory around in many ways is more inhibiting to the performance of your game than absolute teraflops on any one of the individual pieces, and when we designed Scorpio we really thought about this balanced rig that could come together at a price-point,” Spencer reveals. “Like, I want Scorpio to be at a console price-point, I’m not trying to go and compete with a high-end rig. And because we’re building one spec, we’re able to look at the balance between all the components and make sure that it’s something we really hit that matters to consumers and gamers.”

While no final specs for Project Scorpio have been announced yet, this statement does make it clear that whenever the console is released, there will still be some PCs on the market that can outperform it. Given the speed at which technology is advancing though, even if Scorpio did launch with tech that placed it above all of the gaming PCs, it wouldn’t be long before a new device overtook it anyway. What is known is that Scorpio will be significantly more powerful than the existing Xbox One and Xbox One S consoles and that’s what most console gamers are interested in. Scorpio doesn’t have to be the most powerful device on the market, it just needs to move console gamers into the same ballpark as gaming PC users.

Let us know what you think. Is power or price more important to you? What do you want in Project Scorpio? Share your thoughts with the community in the comments below.