Most of that I'm not bothered by, but 60 fps is pretty important. Of course it's different for every game, but surely something like Halo would be a mandatory 60 fps? Will games come with an option for low res high fps?

While it would have been great to have Series S for the Holiday, as it would have sold like hotcakes at $300 with casuals and parents buying to put under the Christmas tree, MS doesn't need Series S to have a strong Holiday. I mean Xbox One sold 3m first Holiday and that was in spite of being less powerful than PS4, more expensive, and having a ton of negative PR from the reveal. If XB1 could sell 3m first Holiday at $500, surely XSX can sell 4m+ at $500 since we are likely looking at more powerful specs (except for SSD) for the same price as PS5, far less negative PR, and a Halo game on launch. 5m could even be in reach possibly, if they can manage to manufacture 5m before the end of the year, which may be possible since they seem to have began production 2 months earlier than usual. 

Series S can safely launch in Q1 2021, where it will sell great through the year with casuals, then light up the sales charts Holiday 2021.

If the past few months have proved anything, it is that video games are largely recession proof. I mean Xbox One had it's biggest NPD April hardware sales this whole gen, even though April had the highest US unemployment rate since the Great Depression in the 1930's due to the forced quarantines. April NPD hardware sales were up 60% YoY across all consoles. April NPD software sales were up 55% YoY across all consoles and PC. If May NPD is also up YoY, I don't think we have to worry about the corona recession hurting Series X and PS5 very much later this year. 

Tell em Mick!

Watching the documentary, Double Helix was so damn passionate about it, they actually seemed upset they were purchased by Amazon, it's a shame that Microsoft's acquisition spree didn't happen sooner and Microsoft in the documentary mentioned they didn't want to create a studio for KI only but times have changed.

Documentary mentioned that Double Helix took a month out of their own time to teach Iron Galaxy everything about Killer Instinct before handing it over.

They should create a studio, call it Ultratech Inc, then poach any veterans of Double Helix from Amazon (Double Helix technically doesn't exist anymore, it was absorbed into Amazon Game Studios as a whole), staff up Ultratech with Double Helix veterans and co-development with Iron Galaxy.

Studio doesn't even need to be that big, no reason it should go over 100 employees I think? Re-hire Mick Gordon since he only left Killer Instinct for Bethesda IPs which he's practically been kicked off Doom now so he's freed up again.

Studio Head can be Ken Lobb.

Not necessarily. After the Unreal 5 PS5 demo, one of the digital foundry guys speculated that Epic may have given Ninja Theory early access to some of the Unreal 5 feature set. The Hellblade 2 trailer from December had no noticeable LoD transitions, and that is a feature of Unreal 5, not Unreal 4. 

But I wouldn't be surprised to see Hellblade 2 release in Q1 2022, it's not really a big enough game to be their big Holiday 2021 game. Not sure what their big Holiday 2021 game will be just yet, the rumored Fable and Perfect Dark reboots from Playground and The Initiative probably can't be finished by Holiday 2021. Holiday 2021 is also too soon for Gears 6. Maybe Obsidian's rumored AAA Pillars game can be ready by then, since it has supposedly been in development since mid 2018, but I'm not sure about that either. Could be that we will see a AAA 2nd party game as their big Holiday 2021 game instead of something from a 1st party studio. 

Well, there is obviously bigger franchises to money-hat but I mean more, they can't counter the fans that a exclusive FF16 would 'steal' for example there's not really another JRPG they could moneyhat/revive anywhere near as big as Final Fantasy and I think genre diversity is more important for Xbox nowadays thanks to Gamepass.

That's more my line of thinking with my fighting example too, Sony owns that market now thanks to SFV, thanks to SFV there's other fighters defacto exclusive to PS5 as well, Microsoft put a lot of effort into Killer Instinct throughout the gen and it grew pretty big to 10 million players, they were even booed at fighting tournaments at the start but turned that around, now it feels like they've abandoned all that effort and are just going to let Sony take the fighting market.

That's a market of customers that will be less likely to join Gamepass because the competitor is way more appealing, they'll take a hit on horror crowds when Silent Hill turns out to be exclusive to PS5 as well but at least they've somewhat mitigating that with a few horror genre exclusives.