Why do I need to worry, MS has an infinite war chest, right?
sure, $299 vs $399 is where you go from being able to put food on your table or not (as if $299 were peanuts). How about something worse than XSS for even less then, why stop there? I do not believe your argument is genuine, sorry. I just do not.
You have not given me or anyone a good reason why a 0.5 TB digital only XSX at $349 would have not been possible since XSX design is so smart and cost efficient unlike the wasteful PS5 which Sony can afford to sell at $399 just by taking the Blu-Ray drive off. Such an Xbox would be a much much better and healthier proposition and would simplify devs’ life (but sure, more difficult to sell those people another affordable $299 XSSv2 in 2022 or something
).
Because you choose not to think about RAM limitations impeding design, or do not see games being able to build gameplay enhancing features with the power available on the GPU (one could have a 1440p or less game with DRS that uses the rest of the GPU performance in the XSX for gameplay enhancing calculations... what do you do on the XSS?) does not means others should. Choice is often let the XSS underperform or design the game around the XSX and brute force things that easily scale upwards.
CPU and SSD speed are two of the biggest changes this generation yes, and mostly XSS delivers there (downclock on the CPU side will still affect you if you try to get every bit of juice out of the XSX as you can...), but the entire system design is not just those components alone: RAM and the GPU (which is getting to be a more and more central and general processing unit as time goes on).
Essentially “XSS could have been worse, MS did not do a horrible job at it” seems like rave reviews for a public interview
.Anyways it is still work added onto developers’ already busy backlog which punishes you more the more ambitious your title is... certainly not the promise of exactly the same experience as the XSX at 1440p as people were pushing it back then (even at 1080p it is a stretch if you want RT too).