Microsoft Slashes Xbox One S Price By $50 Ahead Of Project Scorpio Debut

xbox one s
Microsoft’s badass Project Scorpio is still 24 hours away from its official public unveil, but the fallout from the new console is already being felt. The Redmond, Washington-based software and hardware giant announced today via Twitter that it is cutting prices on existing Xbox One S bundles by $50 effective tomorrow.

That means that the cheapest bundle, the $249 Xbox One S Minecraft Bundle, should fall to a more palatable $199. Likewise, the Xbox One S Battlefield 1 Bundle will see its price reduced from $299 to $249, while the Xbox One S Gears of War 4 Limited Edition Bundle will be priced at $349 (compared to the current $399).

It is unknown if this will be a permanent price drop, but knowing Microsoft, we’re betting that it is. And considering that the PlayStation 4 has been kicking the Xbox One’s butt in sales since the start of the year, Microsoft needs all the help it can get to close the seemingly growing sales gap between the two consoles.

Microsoft will officially unveil the Xbox One S’ follow-up, Project Scorpio, tomorrow at 5PM EST. It will have beastly (for a console) specs, including 6 TFLOPs of compute power.

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Project Scorpio's internals

Here are the confirmed hardware specs for Project Scorpio that Microsoft has already provided:

  • Eight custom AMD x86 CPU cores clocked at 2.3GHz with 4MB L2 cache
  • 40 custom AMD Radeon GPU compute units operating at 1172MHz
  • 12GB of GDDR5 memory over a 384-bit interface with maximum memory bandwidth of 326GB/sec

Tomorrow, we’ll get our first taste of what the final product will look like -- which we’re guessing won’t be anything like the developer units -- and the official name for the console. And we will probably get an idea of how much it will cost, with many reports pegging the starting price at between $399 and $449 when the console launches later this year.