It is no secret that Xbox One sales are struggling and it doesn’t help that there is a great deal of inventory to clear out before the new Xbox One Slim is introduced. However, the bigger issue is like with Nintendo and the Wii U, Microsoft has extremely fuzzy messaging across the board. For many consumers there was confusion up to the time of the Wii U launch about whether the console was a new system or an upgrade. The same confusion is already manifesting itself with Project Scorpio.
On one hand Project Scorpio is touted as the most powerful console ever. On the other hand Xbox boss Phil Spencer said in an interview with Eurogamer that for the average game consumer without a 4K TV Scorpio does not provide any benefit…. Specifically Spencer said, “Scorpio is designed as a 4K console, and if you don't have a 4K TV, the benefit we've designed for, you're not going to see.”
Of course, a day later, Spencer changed tack somewhat in an interview with Giant Bomb:
"If you look at a game like Halo 5, it implements something called dynamic scaling, so as scenes get more complex, in order to maintain 60fps they will actually change the resolution that you're running at. And that's not the only game that does this. So then if you run that game on Project Scorpio you're actually going to be at the max frame rate of that game more often. I'm not going to put that as a top-selling feature of Scorpio because not all games use dynamic scaling. I'm trying to be transparent with people about where we are in the design of Project Scorpio and what it was designed for. It was designed in order to enable these high-fidelity 4K experiences. So some of the existing games will actually run a little better if they're using dynamic scaling, but I wouldn't buy Scorpio to run your existing library of Xbox One games."