According to Sony’s Andrew House, the company was surprised at the announcement of the Xbox Scorpio because they never expected Microsoft to announce it a year before it was coming out. However, maybe I can help House understand why they did so. Microsoft announced the Xbox Scorpio with a 6 Tflops graphics card to effecively make the PlayStation Neo—pegged at 4 Tflops by Sony’s own developer manuals—obsolete before it even came out. It was a brilliant move by Microsoft and will surely affect the mindset of Sony’s customers and maybe even sales.
After this the barrage of uneasy questions regarding PlayStation Neo was initiated by GameSpot. When asked if the PlayStation Neo would offer a substantially improved gaming experience, House said, “This is an additional option. It’s a high-end version of a PlayStation 4, let’s be very clear about that, rather than a generational shift.” There you have it.
While the Xbox Scorpio has the potential of offering a generational shift because Microsoft allows developers to use the 6 Tflops card in any way possible—despite the fact that Xbox has moved beyond generations and all games with work on previous devices—Sony can’t do that. Even House can’t deny that the difference between the combined 4 Tflops performance of the PlayStation Neo can’t compete with the Xbox Scorpio with offers a 6 Tflops graphics card.
Source: GameSpot
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.