I can see what Microsoft was going for with the Xbox Series S. With ambitions to make video games more accessible for all regardless of platform, putting out a digital-only console at a lower price point with more conservative specs made a lot of sense.
In practice, however, it struggled to gain a foothold. While cheaper, its existence as a weaker piece of hardware has become a frequent point of frustration for developers, while 500GB of storage is only enough for a small handful of triple-A titles before you need to start wiping the console to make room for more things. Xbox Series S is intended for a casual audience with its cheaper price point and digital-only approach, more a competitor to the Nintendo Switch than the PS5, but at every turn it seems so intent on pushing those people away.
Xbox Series S Doesn’t Have A Place In The Modern Market
Last year saw Microsoft introduce a 1TB model for Xbox Series S which retails at $299. This is only a hundred dollars and change removed from the Xbox Series X, a better console with a disc drive, more powerful specs, and a machine that developers have already shown much more affinity for in recent years.
It has more longevity, and even casual consumers would be better placed picking one of these up than resorting to the Series S. You can’t exactly yeet it in your backpack like the smaller console and play it at a friend’s house, but when there are so many better options for this kind of experience already, it feels moot. So where exactly will the console go from here, and does it have a future alongside its older sibling?
You can also pick up a digital-only Xbox Series X these days too, which means there’s even less need for a cheaper and smaller console like the Series S.
Microsoft dug its own grave with the Xbox Series S by making cross-platform parity between its two consoles a requirement, meaning that a lot of developers are forced to struggle to create their games for two platforms with drastically different technical capabilities. When the audience is considerably smaller than that found on PS5, for many it is a Herculean effort that doesn’t offer worthwhile returns.
We saw this back in 2023 with Baldur’s Gate 3 when both Xbox versions were delayed as Larian struggled to get local co-op working on the weaker console. Without needing to buy up any rights, Sony found itself with an exclusive hit for months while Microsoft had little choice but to miss out.
It took Phil Spencer to meet with Larian and make an exception for Baldur’s Gate 3 to be released on the console without this X/S parity, removing a defining part of the Xbox console ethos in the process. If you can make an exception for one game, why not others? It puts the Series S in the high-profile position of holding back the Xbox platform because of its weaknesses.
So Does The Smaller Xbox Console Have A Future?
More recently, GameScience bemoaned the lack of an Xbox version of Black Myth: Wukong that fans have been asking about for months now. Speaking on Weibo, co-founder and CEO Feng Ji explained, after praising the PS5 and PC versions of the game, that “the only thing missing is the Xbox, which somehow feels a bit wrong, but that 10GB of shared memory — without years of optimisation experience — is really hard to make work.”
It seems the studio has tried to make Black Myth: Wukong work on Xbox Series X and Series S, but with each version having to be feature complete and matching aside from visuals and performance, it has proven too difficult to make work. This must be frustrating for Microsoft too, because now it’s missing out on another massive hit because its console strategy has blown up in its face. You can’t even stream Wukong on Xbox because it isn’t available, and right now it is unclear if it ever will be. A console that claims to be appealing to a mainstream audience is failing to deliver some of the most mainstream games in recent memory.
Funnily enough, the Series S would work wonderfully as a handheld, and if rumours ring true, Microsoft could be working on something just like it.
As games grow more demanding in technical requirements, the Series S is bound to be left behind – especially in a world where Game Pass hasn’t become the dominating force it once promised to be and Microsoft’s approach to exclusive development fails to bear fruit. There is an alternate reality where the Series S took over the lives of gamers everywhere, but right now there remains a desire for powerful consoles and physical media, so much so, that there doesn’t appear to be a future for this little black and white box.
Xbox Series S
Launched in 2020 along with the more powerful Xbox Series X console, the Series S is the full-digital version of Microsoft’s premier gaming platform.