I mean, fair point, but I still feel like MS is up to something. 

Honestly? It's going to be up to the games.

Clearly, Lockhart dosen't have either the power or innovation going for it. It's just beefed up XBox One in the eyes of the consumer. But if MS (finally) manages to have some excellent(not good, not great, it needs to be excellent) first party lineup, then yeah, the price will start speaking louder, specially with the gigantic economy crash comming up.

Of course. It makes about as much sense as your other ideas in this thread, no offense. And you said nothing about the GPU and CPU deficit. 

You’re essentially saying Scorpio can already run next gen games if you just remove everything that makes them next gen. And instead of supporting cross gen for the launch window as planned they’d be doing it the entire gen. Doesn’t make any sense.

If Lockhart is real, it will be intended to run next gen games at a lower resolution. Not next gen games at a lower resolution and missing features. Not to mention your idea makes it impossible for any of the system capabilities of XSX like quick resume, XVA, etc to be utilized. Again, a terrible idea.

Either way, I got my xbox pom poms ready. Let the console war begin! Ding ding.

Im not. While I dont see it closing the gap, I see this do in really good if they market this as an xbox one x slim. They would already be a head in next gen. At 1080p and no raytracing, I see the xbox one x playing pretty much anything. Thats something the ps4 pro cant do as it dosent have the 12gb ram the x1x has.

Hold on, where you not one of the great defenders of scalability and now you dont understand how games scale? You should really get your act toghether. 

Thats the entire point. If you scale everything back, the weaker gpu and cpu should be able to run anything. Only feture I see the xbox not being able to handle is raytracing. But thatnks to its 12gb of ram, the x1x should be able to keep up with anything else at 1080p. 

Considering MS bought studios will take some years to release, if they will launch crossgen for only 6 months after release of Series X then possibly no game will be released crossgen by MS.

The way Phil and MS keep pushing the 'XBSX is more powerful and has all these unknown advantages' narrative, leaves me with the impression that they know the price will be higher than PS5. It's one thing to boast a bit if the prices are the same, but to me it seems like they are pushing overly hard because the higher cost will have to be very clearly justified.

As for Lockhart, $299 should be plenty low enough, possibly being half or not quite half of what XBSX ends up costing, and should be at least $99 cheaper than PS5 DE. The cheaper it is, the more they have to compromise on hardware, yet they do need a worthy gap between them and PS5 DE. If they could make Lockhart $399, that might undercut PS5 DE by $49 depending on what happens, but then the specs need a significant increase to justify that or it'll be DOA. $299 seems like it would be a safe bet for MS guessing at what was potentially coming for PS5.

A question that should really be asked, is does MS believe the XB1 branding is tainted, and would they be better served to drop it altogether next gen? While that would leave the sub $299 price range solely to PS4, it would allow MS to take a step towards getting rid of the XB1 negativity. It couldn't be forgotten completely as they will still be supporting XB1 consoles, but being able to say they are no longer selling that hardware, would be a way to make it look like they are making a worthy push into next gen without being held back as much. It would mostly be marketing PR, but MS needs all the positivity they can get now and going forward.

The fact that they called it "Series X", says to me, if there is going to be another lesser console, that's spec'd similar to XB1X, then there is next to no reason to keep the XB1X. Call it 'Series Whatever' and move forward, dropping XB1X. Maybe that means no more XB1S as well, maybe not. We'll see. 

If Lockhart is real and does exist with specs close to what has been leaked, who's to say there isn't a lower tier below that to compete with PS4? Perhaps just an xCloud streaming box. Maybe they end up with Series S, Series E, Series X. $199, $349, $499. Now that would be really interesting.

Would that be mic drop worthy in terms of hardware?

I understand how games can scale just fine. But it’s insane to think MS can go all gen supporting games across such old hardware. Luckily they don’t share your crazy ideas. No point in me arguing or speculating any further on something so laughable lol.