Xbox Series X and Series S

• 1. A Quiet Transition

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  For weeks in the summer of 2020, the Xbox Series S was hiding in plain sight. Microsoft had not officially announced the smaller console, but it appeared quietly in the backgrounds of Phil Spencer's announcement videos. Nobody noticed until Microsoft pointed it out themselves. That deliberate concealment captures something essential about the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. These were two consoles built around the idea that a generational change does not have to feel like a rupture.

  On the 10th of November 2020, Microsoft released both machines simultaneously. The Series X was a tall matte-black tower aimed at 4K gaming at 60 frames per second. The Series S was a compact, disc-free device targeting 1440p resolution. They were the fourth generation of Xbox hardware and part of the ninth generation of consoles overall, arriving the same month as Sony's PlayStation 5. Their arrival raised questions that would take years to answer. Could a policy of deliberate continuity make a console generation feel irrelevant? Could a budget sibling with a fraction of the processing power hold the entire platform back? And what does a flagship launch look like when the game meant to define it misses the date?

• 2. Engineering the Tower

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  Aaron Greenberg revealed the development codename for the lower-cost console: Project Lockhart. The name came from Lockhart, Texas, which Greenberg described as "the little city with the big heart."

  Microsoft's hardware team began planning the successor to Xbox One around 2016, and they decided from the start to build both consoles in parallel. The constraint was absolute: every game released for one had to run on the other without exception. That requirement shaped every engineering decision that followed.

  The new GPU had to deliver at least double the floating-point performance of the Xbox One X. The CPU had to be four times as powerful. Acoustic performance had to match what Xbox One owners already expected. Meeting those targets meant drawing approximately 315 watts of internal power. Engineers responded by splitting the hardware onto two separate circuit boards. One carried the CPU, GPU, memory, and power regulators. The other handled slower input and output functions. Both boards mounted on opposite sides of an aluminum chassis, creating air channels for cooling between them.

  Principal designer Chris Kujawski described arranging the remaining parts as Tetris-like. The heat sink, electrical shielding, power supply, optical drive, and cooling fan were fitted around one another to achieve the most compact shape possible. The result was a tower with a footprint of 15.1 by 15.1 centimeters, standing 30.1 centimeters tall and weighing 4.45 kilograms. Phil Spencer said the console included numerous sensors for controlling fan speed. The large open top was necessary to maintain adequate airflow through the unit.

  At approximately 60 percent smaller by volume than the Series X, the Series S was engineered with portability in mind. It measures 275 by 151 by 63.5 millimeters in vertical orientation. The Series S launched in matte white with a matching controller, setting it apart visually from its larger sibling. An earlier design proposal had included a TOSLINK port for digital audio output, but engineers removed it before the final hardware reached consumers.

• 3. Xbox Velocity Architecture

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  Developers at The Coalition loaded Gears 5 on an Xbox Series X without changing a single line of code. It loaded four times faster than on the Xbox One X.

  Both consoles use a storage system Microsoft calls Xbox Velocity Architecture. Its foundation is a custom NVM Express solid-state drive. On the Series X, the drive holds 1 TB and delivers 2.4 gigabytes per second of raw throughput. An onboard compression block combines two algorithms. One is the standard zlib format used across the industry; the other is a proprietary system called BCPack, designed specifically for game textures. Combined, these raise effective throughput to as high as 4.8 gigabytes per second. The Series S ships with a 512 GB drive at the same raw throughput rate.

  A new API called DirectStorage lets developers set the priority of data loading relative to other processing tasks. A second feature, sampler feedback streaming, loads only the portions of a texture that a game needs at a specific moment. This replaces the older approach of reading an entire texture file before any part of it could be used.

  At launch, Seagate Technology was the sole manufacturer of proprietary expansion storage cards, limited to 1 TB per card. Versions of 512 GB and 2 TB became available by the end of 2021. Western Digital entered the market in June 2023. Seagate released 4 TB cards in June 2025. Microsoft extended DirectStorage to Windows computers in March 2022, requiring DirectX 12 support and a compatible NVMe drive.

  The Coalition reported that the Gears 5 load time improvement could grow further once their code was updated to take direct advantage of DirectStorage routines.

• 4. Four Generations at Once

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  Spencer said in December 2019 that he had been personally helping test backward-compatible games in the run-up to launch.

  Microsoft invested more than 500,000 man-hours validating games from the Xbox One library before the new consoles shipped. Backward compatibility at launch covered four generations: the original Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and the new consoles themselves. The only titles excluded were those that required the Kinect sensor. In June 2019, Microsoft stopped adding new Xbox 360 and original Xbox games to the Xbox One backward-compatibility program. All engineering resources shifted toward making the existing library run on the new hardware instead.

  Auto HDR uses machine learning to add high-dynamic-range rendering to games that shipped without it. Anisotropic filtering improved to 16x on older titles. In February 2021, Microsoft introduced FPS Boost, which could increase the framerate of compatible backward-compatible games by a factor of two to four. Microsoft's engineers discovered that, on many older games, the CPU and GPU on the newer consoles frequently sat idle even with other enhancements running. FPS Boost redirected those unused cycles toward frame rate improvements. Five games supported the feature at launch; by May 2021, about 97 titles had received it.

  Xbox 360 titles received free cloud saves as part of the backward-compatibility rollout. Players could carry their save data to a new console without losing progress. Quick Resume, which suspends and restores up to three games at once, supports backward-compatible titles as well.

  As launch neared, Microsoft reopened a submission process for players to suggest additional backward-compatible games. The team said that "Resurrecting titles from history often presents a complex mix of technical and licensing challenges."

• 5. A Launch Under Pandemic

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  Microsoft had scheduled detailed hardware and launch-game announcements for the 2020 Game Developers Conference and E3 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic cancelled both events before either could take place.

  On the 16th of March 2020, Microsoft, Digital Foundry, and Austin Evans of Overclock Media presented the hardware specifications online. A series of digital events branded "Xbox 20/20" ran from May 2020 through launch. The Xbox Games Showcase took place on the 23rd of July 2020, featuring games principally from first-party Xbox Game Studios.

  Spencer said the company started production later than planned in mid-2020, waiting for key AMD chip technology. By launch, Microsoft had reached full production capacity but still could not meet demand. Both consoles sold out across every retailer and market. Xbox chief financial officer Tim Stuart said in November 2020 that shortages were likely to end in the second quarter of 2021. A global chip shortage that ran through 2023 extended those supply problems.

  Halo Infinite had been positioned as the defining launch title for the Series X. Microsoft and developer 343 Industries delayed it past launch, citing production difficulties tied to the pandemic. At launch, 31 games were available, including titles from Xbox Game Studios and third-party publishers, but the game meant to represent the new generation was not among them.

  The Xbox Series X's tower proportions had already inspired a widespread internet comparison to a compact refrigerator. Microsoft turned this into a promotion, commissioning a limited run of real fridges styled after the console, complete with a disc-drive-style handle, green interior lighting, and the Xbox startup sound. Snoop Dogg and iJustine were among the celebrities who received one. In March 2021, Dwayne Johnson offered smaller versions to promote his Zoa Energy drink line. After the official Xbox Twitter account won a brand marketing competition in April 2021, Aaron Greenberg confirmed that Microsoft would sell mini-fridges directly to consumers. Pre-orders opened in October 2021, with distribution planned for December 2021 across North America and European markets.

• 6. Sales and the Console Wars

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  On the 22nd of June 2023, during legal proceedings over Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition, the company acknowledged that it had "lost the console wars."

  Microsoft stated that Xbox's console has "consistently ranked third of three behind PlayStation and Nintendo in sales." In 2021, Xbox held a 16 percent share of the console market. The combined worldwide sell-through of Xbox Series X and Series S reached an estimated 3.5 million units by the end of 2020. That grew to 6.5 million by June 2021. At the same post-launch point, the Xbox One had sold 5.7 million units and the Xbox 360 had sold 5 million. Ampere Analysis estimated combined sales at 18.5 million by the end of 2022. In June 2023, Microsoft confirmed during a presentation in Brazil that the total had passed 21 million. As of June 2024, the figure stood at 28.3 million worldwide. Estimates as of February 2026 placed the combined total above 35 million.

  Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella confirmed on the 27th of July 2021 that the Series X and S were the fastest-selling Xbox consoles ever. The previous record had been held by the Xbox One, which sold more than one million units in its first 24 hours. Sony's PlayStation 5 had sold 40 million units as of July 2023, roughly twice the Xbox figure at that time.

  In Japan, 20,534 units sold during launch week. By November 2021, the consoles had surpassed the Xbox One's entire Japanese lifetime sales total, crossing 116,000 units in under a year. By the end of 2022, the Japanese total reached 400,000 units. In the UK, 155,000 units sold on launch day, two-thirds of them Series X consoles. UK sales reached 1.8 million by the end of 2022.

  Leadbetter of Eurogamer praised the hardware's forward-looking features as expertly implemented but wrote that a console is defined by its games, and at launch he barely felt he knew the machine. Keza MacDonald of The Guardian wrote that while there was no immediate driving force to buy at launch, "there's not much to criticise: they do everything they promised to do, and they do it well." Writers at Gamasutra credited Microsoft with delivering "two highly appealing entry points that can turn players into long-term customers" while erasing the traditional idea of console generations.

  By November 2021, Jordan Ramée of GameSpot called Smart Delivery "crucial" and noted that PlayStation 5's comparable system was less clear about which version of a game players were downloading, sometimes causing them to install the PS4 edition by mistake.

• 7. The Series S Constraint

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  In August 2023, Larian Studios announced that Baldur's Gate 3 would release for both Xbox Series consoles. Split-screen co-op would not be available on the Series S version.

  For months before that announcement, Larian had not officially announced an Xbox version at all. The absence sparked a rumor that the game was a PlayStation console exclusive. The studio denied the claim. The real barrier was technical: the Series S's hardware limitations made split-screen co-op impossible to implement on that console. Larian met directly with Spencer to discuss the problem. They agreed to release Baldur's Gate 3 on both consoles, shipping the Series S version without the feature rather than delaying both releases further. By January 2025, Larian released a patch that restored split-screen co-op for Series S owners.

  Spencer had already acknowledged that the constraint extended to first-party titles as well. Split-screen co-op in Forza titles was also unavailable on the Series S. In March 2023, Remedy, the developer of Control, said the lowest-specification console in a family determines the features any cross-platform game can include. The studio described optimization as far more complex than simply reducing resolution and texture quality.

  Spencer said in January 2025 that the requirement to support the Series S would not be lifted. He offered a practical argument: games that target the Series S can generally also run on lower-powered devices like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally, making the Series S specification a useful baseline for broader platform compatibility.

  At Gamescom 2023, Spencer said Microsoft would not produce a mid-generation revision of either console. He added that future hardware should "have a reason to exist that is demonstrably different than what came before." He said Microsoft's next hardware would likely belong to the tenth generation of consoles.

• 8. Refreshes and Rising Prices

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  Court documents filed in the FTC v. Microsoft case in 2022 had already hinted that mid-generation revisions were being planned.

  Brooklin was the codename for the Xbox Series X refresh: a cylindrical design, no optical drive, 2 TB of internal storage, and Wi-Fi 6E. Ellewood was the codename for the Series S refresh, keeping the same form while adding Wi-Fi 6E, 1 TB of storage, and lower power consumption. Sebile was the codename for a new controller planned to ship alongside both refreshes. Microsoft planned to sell it as the Xbox Universal Controller, with a rechargeable, swappable battery.

  The consoles Microsoft actually released on the 15th of October 2024 differed from those early plans. Microsoft released a 1 TB Series S in white, a 1 TB all-digital Series X in white, and the 2 TB Xbox Series X Galaxy Black Special Edition. The new Series X models used a redesigned motherboard with a smaller system-on-chip and replaced the vapor chamber cooling system with copper heat pipes. Microsoft reported slightly reduced power consumption across the new models.

  In 2025, global tariffs and a RAM shortage pushed prices higher. The Xbox Series X rose from $499.99 to $649.99. The Series S rose from $299.99 to $399.99. The 2 TB Series X reached $799.99. The 1 TB all-digital Series X, which had launched in October 2024 at $449.99, rose to $599.99 by 2025.