By Nelson Schneider - 05/07/17 at 05:55 PM CT

While it still doesn’t have an official name or release date outside of ‘holiday 2017,’ recently new information has been revealed about the upcoming successor to the XBONE, the Xbox Codenamed ‘Scorpio.’ As an Xbox hater since the very beginning, when Microsoft began adapting many of the most annoying aspects of PC gaming for console gaming consumption, anything Microsoft might do that has ‘Xbox’ in the name is a hard sell for me. But the company has proven that the flow goes both ways, and I have gotten significant use and enjoyment out of a number of their console-centric ideas that found their way into the Windows PC operating system.

With Scorpio, Microsoft is running off a ‘four-pillar’ model, with four key areas of focus that they hope will allow their next effort to redeem the utter failure of the XBONE (and perhaps become the first Xbox console to turn a profit). These four pillars are as follows:

1. Regain the hearts and minds of developers.
Microsoft definitely needs to regain hearts and minds, but not just from developers. They lost faith, even among those deluded souls who supported the Xbox and Xbox 360, when they announced their hare-brained DRM scheme for the XBONE… and when they introduced that console without any games to show, but instead spent the entire press event talking about TV and sports. Microsoft also has never had the hearts and/or minds of non-American developers and publishers. Japan and the East essentially ignore the entire Xbox line of products, making Xbox hardware a hard sell in the region. Even worse, when Microsoft does spend money courting exclusives from non-Western teams, the games perform poorly in the market simply because Xbox is not known for genre diversity. If Microsoft is really serious about opening hearts and minds, they need to reshape the Xbox’s image from the DudeBroHaloShooterMaddenBox to that of a broad-appeal device.

2. Deliver enough hardware power for a true 4K experience.
4K, to me, seems like a huge waste of time, much like the pursuit of 1440p resolution. The point of diminishing returns was hit a long time ago, and while, yes, it is possible to notice some small quality improvement when switching from 720p to 1080p to 4K, the ‘wow’ factor that caused people to abandon 480i in droves just isn’t there. I can read the text on a 720p screen just as easily as a 4K screen… in fact, it might actually be easier to read text at lower resolutions because the text itself appears bigger. The same could not be said of 480i analog signals, which were blurry and subject to all sorts of interference. Simply because the market continues to push higher-resolution screens doesn’t mean that they are particularly relevant as a target. The vast majority of both PC and console gamers are still using regular old HD screens, replacing them with Ultra HD screens only as they break or need to be replaced for other reasons. It’s great that 4K screens have dropped in price as quickly as they have, but just because they’re available and becoming affordable doesn’t mean that they are commonplace, nor worth the hardware investment to support, especially when upscaling can be done much cheaper and looks just fine. When Over9000!p becomes the norm and older resolutions look blurry and unreadable, sure, it’ll be time to think about a new standard. Of course, these futuristic Extra-Ultra High Definition screens might be wearables, rendering size issues and pixel density a problem of the past.

3. Provide complete compatibility with existing hardware and software.
I’m very pleased that Microsoft wants to support full backward – and apparently forward – compatibility in the Xbox line. The plague of remasters needs to come to an end, and that will only happen if the ability to resell slightly different versions of games to the consumer public goes away. With this one step, Microsoft is bringing one of the biggest boons from PC gaming to the console space in an official capacity. Hopefully they still remember the bad reaction their always-online DRM/no used games scheme received on the XBONE and handle perpetual compatibility in a user-friendly manner.

4. Deliver a luminary experience for those still sticking with 1080p screens.
I don’t really see how ‘lighting-up’ 1080p screens is worthy of being a pillar on its own. I have tried super-sampling on PC, and didn’t notice any benefit. In fact, the whole process merely pissed me off by resizing and moving all my desktop windows thanks to the resolution change. It seems to me that this is really more of a half-pillar that should be slapped on top of pillar #2 to create a more useful structure.

Outside of these four pillars, most of the (relatively small amount of) buzz surrounding the Scorpio involves specs, performance, and hardware. If Microsoft messed up with the XBONE by showing TV and sports instead of games, I think they might be in the process of messing up again by worrying more about hardware than games. There is a certain breed of ‘Glorious’ PC Gaming Master Racist who loves spending money on hardware, tinkering with overclocks, water cooling, upgrading, and obsessing over benchmarks than they do actually playing games. Everything I read about the Scorpio smacks of this kind of hardware fetishism. Why should I care that the Scorpio can push native 4K pixels to a screen if the game being pushed is crap, samey “AAA” schlock, and/or available on a platform I already own? All of these specs and numbers sound impressive, but in the real world, people buy game consoles en masse because they want to play games. Targeting the tiny handful of people who buy hardware because they love hardware is fruitless… even moreso because these dedicated Master Racists wouldn’t touch a console no matter how impressive the specs… they’d just try to out-built it with off-the-shelf components.

My position has always been, and remains, that Microsoft should use the Xbox line to push PC gaming into the living room, moreso than they should use it to push themselves into the console gaming market. With that in mind, here are four better pillars for Microsoft to consider:

1. Windows is Xbox; Xbox is Windows
The XBONE already runs Windows. Microsoft already offers cross-buy compatibility, allowing users to buy a piece of software once and use it on both Windows and XBONE consoles. There is no reason that the Scorpio shouldn’t run full-blown Windows 10, at this point. Valve has failed to push Steam Machines to the top of the heap ONLY because Steam Machines run SteamOS, which is Linux, and therefore sucks. Nobody wants to use Linux to play a sliver of their game library. They want to use Windows to play ALL OF IT. Why won’t you let us play our games on your hardware, Microsoft? Furthermore, why can’t I buy a retail XBONE disc and play it in my PC’s Blu-Ray drive? This double-standard needs to end.

2. Games and their Intellectual Properties sell hardware, not the other way around.
All of this worry about flops and p’s and K’s is fruitless. I can’t play with a flop, p, or K. I can play with a game. Instead of focusing on making amazing hardware that won’t have any software, Microsoft needs to double down on making great software, then tailoring the hardware around it. Buying struggling studios – and there have been a LOT of them in the last decade – is the best place to spend all of that Bill Gates money. If Microsoft can offer amazing games that are only playable on Windows/Xbox, people will come to the platform regardless of the hardware. And it’s a friggin’ PC! The hardware can change every other year! Why put so much effort into something that by its very nature can’t be future-proof?

3. Compatibility is King!
The idea of perpetual forward and backward compatibility is the only one of Microsoft’s pillars that has merit: It’s a great idea. However, it doesn’t go far enough. Sure, locked-down consoles that only run tightly controlled software are secure, but they are also anathema to the idea of compatibility. The day that I can install Steam and GOG Galaxy on an Xbox – thus bringing my significant back catalog of games with me – is the day I… would consider buying an Xbox.

4. The Free2Play Model is best applied to services, not games.
There are lots of ‘games,’ (read: apps) being released for free nowadays. They require time and effort to develop, and cost a non-zero sum of money to publish. Yet the vast, overwhelming majority of people who play them don’t pay anything for the dubious privilege. On the other hand, in order to play even the most basic online modes on Xbox (and thanks to the precedent set by Xbox, on PlayStation and soon on Nintendo as well), it costs money every month. Does it somehow cost less to maintain the servers in a Free2Play game than it does to maintain the matchmaking servers on Xbox Live? Do Free2Play games somehow earn so much more money than Buy2Play games that it is necessary to shackle the Buy2Play games’ online modes to a mandatory subscription? Surely this is nonsense, and surely there is a better way to monetize online services than an obnoxious subscription.