Xbox Scorpio Making "Amazing Progress," Spencer Says

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has provided an update regarding how the Project Scorpio console is coming along. Spencer said he attended a day-long meeting for the console this week and is optimistic about the company's ability to have it out on schedule next holiday.

"I'm in a day-long review of where the team is on Scorpio right now," Spencer said on Twitter in response to someone who asked if Scorpio might be released early. "Amazing progress and we are feeling good about schedule."

Spencer's comments about Project Scorpio follow on from what he told GameSpot earlier this month about the device and how development is shaping up. Things are going "really well," he told us, adding that Microsoft is in fact "a little ahead of plan" as it relates to the hardware timelines.

"There is a lot of time to go, but we feel good about how the things are coming together," he said. "The teams understand the performance spec that we're building. We went through some of the high-level specs at E3 in the video. And it gives the teams time to make sure that they're targeting that performance for their games. Luckily so many of both our internal teams and partners are also building on PC.

"So it's not hard for us to say, 'Okay this is the PC spec that you can expect with what we're building on Scorpio,' so it allows them to make sure they have the assets and capability to deliver. Since we're focusing on a box that can support true 4K and a 4K frame buffer and a lot of PC games already support that; it's not a new language or asset base for them in terms of things that we're asking them to go do. I'm also pretty confident in the content lineup that we'll see."

Project Scorpio is described by Microsoft as the "most powerful console ever made." Spencer, like others before him, have said the console is "premium" in nature, which suggests it won't be cheap. Since it's going to be more powerful than the Xbox One S, it will be priced accordingly, but the exact price point remains a mystery for now.

"We expect both of these products [Xbox One S and Project Scorpio] to be in market at the same time, and that there's a clear performance difference and obviously there will be a price difference between the two things," he said. "But I also want people to understand that Scorpio is going to be a premium console. Like, I'm not trying to sell you a high-end gaming PC rig for a couple of thousand dollars or something. We look at consumer price points of consoles and definitely our target is to hit that.

"But it will be a premium version of an Xbox One and we'll talk more about pricing as we're cutting it closer to the launch and everything else. But I'm confident that we'll be able to deliver a product at a price point that gamers will feel like is worth it."

Sony's new, more powerful console, the PS4 Pro, goes on sale in November, priced at $400.