Microsoft confirms compact, $299 Xbox Series S

Many of those same developers will also be publishing those games on PC, and will likely already have to make certain effects toggleable or "slider-able".

If you simply downsample the textures as part of your pipeline, turn off some reflection maps, and a few other low hanging fruit effects you could easily bring the game down to the previous generation.

It's not flipping a switch, but it is not too hard and some of it the major 3d engines provide mechanisms for

One hypothesis I saw months ago from a techtuber channel was that the cheaper model will support a game streaming subscription business down the line, making the hardware itself mostly a content delivery box. If true, cheap hardware with a cheap subscription will upend the existing console biz models.

That specific idea works to the extent that streaming games over the internet pans out(so far, countless overhyped failures). But a version of the plan where devs are given two SKU targets up-front would in fact be an evolution of how the last generation played out, where a mid-generation refresh happened and turned out not to be a complete waste of time.

Being able to launch with price discrimination reflects on how gaming tech isn't moving all that quickly now. The graphics fidelity is still going up but in a controlled fashion: higher screen resolutions, bigger textures, heavier shaders. The biggest underlying technical change of the coming generation is an emphasis on fast SSDs, and even a $299 SKU can have one of those.

I think it's actually really smart. Xbox and PlayStation sit awkwardly between the casual Nintendo gamers and the hardcore PC gamers. This is a way to steal market share from both sides because as the other comment mentions, these games are typically adjustable in terms of graphical quality so the user that "just wants to play" and doesn't have the fancy TV can participate more easily while the gamer that prefers consoles but envies the specs of a PC can get their cake and eat it too.

Yes its an interesting gambit. This puts it at very competitive price point and could pick up a lot of buyers.

It has the same CPU but less RAM and GPU cores. I guess they're assuming they can lower the frame buffer size, shade less pixels, and save ram (and maybe even disk?) by never loading the highest resolution mip level.

It has been almost 7 years since the Xbox One launched... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One

Console generations have generally averaged 7 years for quite a while now.

Well if it's unopened it might be worth a fortune someday, so hang on to it!

They were AMD CPU/GPU last time around as well