Microsoft Reveals Project Scorpio Specs, Wants Consumers to Buy Consoles Like Phones

Microsoft revealed the hardware specifications for their still-code-named Project Scorpio this morning via Eurogamer, and boy, is it powerful, apparently.

Versus the PS4 Pro, Scorpio has a stronger GPU (30 percent faster) and CPU (4.6 times stronger), more memory and memory bandwidth, and an optical drive that can play 4K and UHD disks (which the Pro surprisingly lacks). The console will even improve game visuals on non-4K screens. It’s also said to be able to run all Xbox One and backwards-compatible Xbox 360 titles—and run them better than their originally intended consoles. For the full breakdown of what any of that means, you can read more of Eurogamer’s report here.

As for why the hell Microsoft is leading their console announcements with such an in-depth tech breakdown, or why they’re releasing a new console at all, Xbox VP Mike Ybarra explained that Microsoft wants to “win developers back,” and that this is what “premium customers” really want. 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.

For around four years now, Ybarra has also been comparing console consumers to phone consumers:

When you think about phones, for example, consumers are buying phones more frequently than we’ve ever seen. Their expectation of technology is they no longer need to wait for it, it’s immediately there in front of them and they expect all of their content to flow across those devices, too.

For more on the why of Project Scorpio, you can read the rest of that Eurogamer interview here. We still don’t know the name or release date of Microsoft’s new console, but one can almost guarantee such an announcement will be made by this June’s E3. Be sure to stay tuned to Paste for more when that news arrives, and find a June 2016 Project Scorpio sizzle reel below.