LOS ANGELES—Gamers have been nervous about the announcement of Microsoft's "Scorpio" and Sony's "Neo" console updates for months. But Microsoft assuaged some of those fears in the first few minutes of its E3 press event this week by doing something incredibly simple: It took a page from Sony's playbook.
Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One S is smaller than the Xbox One. That's it. Job done. Nailed it. Just like Sony nailed it with the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, both of which were smaller and less expensive than their predecessors.
That's how you do it. We don't know if the Xbox One S is more powerful than the Xbox One. Frankly, we don't want to know. It might have some more juice running through it considering the HDR support, but that's a weirdly specific feature. HDR looks incredibly pretty if it's content that's mastered (or perhaps rendered, for games) in HDR, but it doesn't need anywhere near the sort of power 4K resolution does, and it'll only really benefit the subset of gamers who have high-end, HDR-capable televisions.
In the end, the One S is just a smaller Xbone with a $300 price tag coming out in August. "But will it come with Kinect," you might ask? I'm kidding. Nobody will ever ask that. Ever.
Sony ceded this fight with its E3 press conference. The company has been pointedly demonstrating how the PlayStation 4 already has enough power to run PlayStation VR, so it will remain as is for now. Maybe the mysterious PlayStation Neo will come some day but not this year.
The lack of any new hardware announcement from Sony makes the Xbox One S a win for Microsoft. Like the PS2 and PS3, the Xbox One S provides an affordable way to play new media. Granted, it's partway through the Xbox One's life cycle, but it's the very beginning of 4K Blu-ray's life cycle, and that's a big factor.
If you want to watch 4K movies on discs you actually own (or get the best and most consistent 4K video streams, with HDR support), the Xbox One S is the only choice until Samsung, Panasonic, or some other manufacturer announces a $200 4K Blu-ray player. Interestingly enough, even though Sony Pictures releases its newest films on 4K Blu-ray, Sony has not actually produced a player yet.
Maybe the Xbox One S is a bit more powerful than the Xbox One. Maybe it'll lock out content from other systems down the line as developers take advantage of that power. But that won't be an issue for a while, and since Project Scorpio—with 6 teraflops of GPU for true 4K gaming and high-fidelity VR—doesn't arrive until late 2017, we'll continue to speculate for another year. Until then, it will remain a vague threat, not an actual problem.