Project Scorpio is being made for the ‘premium customer,’ Microsoft says

When Microsoft went into the designing stage for its upcoming Project Scorpio, one of the company’s goals was to make a more powerful machine than the PlayStation 4 Pro and create a system for the “gamer that expects the absolute best versions of the game.”

Mike Ybarra, corporate vice president of the Xbox and Windows gaming platform at Microsoft, sat down with Digital Foundry for an in-depth look at Project Scorpio and what it was capable of. The console’s specs were among some of the information revealed, including eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3GHz, a 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive and a UHD Blu-ray drive. Ybarra said it was all part of an initiative to get the most powerful games into the hands of core Xbox gamers.

“When we see consumers tell us they want 'the latest technology, the latest experience, the best experience more frequently' to our traditional console business that doesn't really align with that, you have to pause, you have to take some pretty big risks,” Ybarra said. “We're taking that big risk to release something we know consumers want.”

It’s not just consumers that Microsoft is trying to win over with Project Scorpio, either. Ybarra said another main goal for the company was to win back the hearts of developers. When the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launched in 2013, developers were far more taken with the power of the former console, according to Digital Foundry. Microsoft is looking to reverse that with Project Scorpio, according to Ybarra.

“We have to win the hearts and minds of developers," Ybarra said. "We have to have the right toolset that lets them bring out their games across the whole family of products and let them create the absolute best versions of those games."

Despite releasing the specs, there’s still a ton of information we don’t know about the console. We don’t know when it’s going to be released exactly, we don’t know what it looks like and, perhaps most importantly, we don’t know how much it’s going to cost. Digital Foundry is estimating that Scorpio will be on the high end, releasing for approximately $499 upon launch — the same as the Xbox One when it was first released.

More information about the Scorpio is expected to be released in the coming months, including at this year’s E3 taking place in June.