While he wasn't ready to announce the price point, Phil Spencer assured fans that Project Scorpio will be competitively priced.
In a recent interview with NZ Gamer, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer hinted that the price of Project Scorpio will likely not be as high as some gamers fear it might be.
"We thought about the price performance of what we wanted to hit with the Scorpio, relative to what we were going to be able to do with the S," said Spencer on Microsoft's pricing strategy. "So that we would have a good price continuum, so people wouldn’t look at these two things as so disconnected because of the price delta."
Spencer goes on to describe Project Scorpio as a "premium product, a premium console," but that he doesn't want people to worry that "this thing is going to be unlike any console price you’ve ever seen. We didn’t design it that way."
The idea that the Xbox One S's price was decided with the Scorpio's price in mind certainly makes sense when you consider that Microsoft continues to emphasize that they are not planning on creating an exclusive line of Project Scorpio titles. That being the case, it would have been unusual to see the kind of price jump for the Scorpio that we typically associate with next generation consoles.
It was also quite interesting to hear Spencer state that the pricing of the Xbox One S greatly depended on the size of the hard drive players wanted and hard drive size is "a critical part of this whole product." That seems to be a warning to fans to consider the size of Project Scorpio's hard drive when comparing its eventual price to that of the Xbox One S. However, it also could indicate that Project Scorpio might be an options heavy system as some speculate it might be.
Spencer was also not ready to commit to an answer when it came to the question of whether or not Project Scorpio will have a physical 4K drive, but he did state that the response to the inclusion of such a disc drive in the Xbox One S has been positive. While it's possible Microsoft could try a different approach with Scorpio, at the moment Spencer believes that when it comes to their upcoming console and 4K disk drives that "it seems like we would want to continue to ride that option."