On November 10 this year, Microsoft‘s new Xbox game console will go on sale, and the company has launched two models for different customers. The first is a large-scale game console with a black appearance priced at $500, called Xbox Series X , which will be Microsoft’s most powerful game console. The design of the second model is like the shadow of Xbox Series X. The body is thinner and has a white rectangular shape with a prominent black circle on it. It is called Xbox Series S. This will be the most affordable new game console on the market at a price only For 300 dollars.
One of them looks like it was designed by Stanley Kubrick (famous director, whose representative works are “2001 A Space Odyssey”, “A Clockwork Orange”), and the other seems to come from Dieter Rams (Dieter Rams, a well-known German industrial designer, put forward ten requirements for design. The design concept is “less but better”. He inspired Apple’s style.) The hand. But the purpose of Microsoft designing these two products is to hope that people will forget the existence of the game console itself. Its design team believes in the idea: “Let the game console remain quiet, literally and visually.”
Phil Spencer, executive vice president of Microsoft’s game business, said: “We treat game consoles as part of the user’s living environment. When you turn on the game console, you can enjoy the wonderful feeling it brings. But when When you put the game console anywhere, we hope you will never touch it again, never hear its sound again. It is just a tool for you to play great games, but it is not the focus of attention.”
As if to prove this, in July this year, before the Xbox Series S design was made public, Spencer was interviewed in his home office. In the background, the Xbox Series S is sandwiched between a pile of books. But it wasn’t until Microsoft disclosed the gimmick last week that no one noticed this.
However, although companies like Google have been designing technology that can sneak into the living room for a long time, this silent approach oversimplifies Microsoft’s ambitious strategy for designing the next generation of game consoles. Spencer said: “We really developed the current strategy around the idea of playing the game you want with the people you want on the devices you want or already have.”
This is because by 2020, dozens of mobile devices produced by various manufacturers can play “Fortnite” well, buy game consoles every eight years or so, and then play new video games on TV The era is past. This is why Microsoft designed the new game console. It is not the protagonist, but an important part of the Xbox ecosystem, which includes a subscription service called Game Pass and the option to play these games to Android phones on xCloud. In addition, in an unprecedented action, the previous generation of Xbox will support many upcoming Xbox games, such as the new version of “Halo”. The new Xbox can also play all the old Xbox games that people already own.
Spencer said: “When I buy a game, I should be able to continue to play this game on the next generation of consoles. Our bigger goal is: Can we build a platform so that more people want more Playing more games frequently?”
Build a better Xbox
In 2014, when Spencer was promoted to head of the Xbox department, the situation he faced was very bad. When Microsoft launched the Xbox One console in 2013, it was more than $100 more expensive than its main competitor, Playstation 4, and its actual processing power was lower. This was because it adopted a future-oriented user interface, including Kinect voice and The gesture camera focuses more on media content other than the game itself, and even has smart home functions. These decisions attracted a lot of criticism from customers, and eventually formed a saying that Sony cares more about video games, while Microsoft does not.
Spencer said: “We did a great job at the beginning of the 2013 holiday shopping season. The pent-up demand was so high that our products were in short supply. Then next year, you will continue to see the natural trajectory of competition. Microsoft’s development trajectory has not been able to catch up with Sony. Seven years later, although the Xbox division is still a multi-billion dollar and lucrative business for Microsoft, PS4 sales are twice as high as Xbox One.
Spencer said: “For me, what is more important than any product or business is the state of my team. The Xbox team is transparent, and they are confused about why we lost to Sony. We are developing products. For our own reasons or for our customers? As a company, do our ambitions exceed customer expectations of our products?”
Spencer put the Xbox team’s focus on the “game company” and guided them to build the entire Xbox product roadmap around this. Kinect is stocked, as does the experimental virtual reality (VR) integration. Microsoft surveyed gamers and asked what the Xbox brand means to them and what legacy it has left in the gaming field. One word they heard reminded people of the scene where the first Xbox was made in 2001, when Bill Gates thought he could make game consoles, but many people thought it seemed like a joke.
The word is performance. Processing power is not only important to the gaming industry, it has been part of the Xbox brand since Xbox first came out as a powerful competitor to Playstation 2. Therefore, in 2017, when the team began to consider what the next Xbox would look like, they wanted to inherit the tradition and find the strongest design possible. About 5 designers and 8 engineers worked together, imagining processors that did not exist at the time. The design team started to make foam models, and the different shapes depend on the internal architecture of the next-generation Xbox.
Microsoft has made many models, some of them look like Xbox One, some like tape recorders or deformed pizza boxes. These game consoles tend to be large, but in a flat shape, because they only have a motherboard on the bottom, and the processor and cooling system are stacked on the top. However, the idea of the engineering team was that the next Xbox could split the motherboard in two. Such an architecture can fit into a thicker but not so wide box, as we have seen in huge tower personal computers.
Air can cool the chip by rotating the center of the game console, and it will be able to produce 12 trillion floating point processing power (2 trillion floating point more than the upcoming PS5). Chris Kujawski, head of design at Microsoft, who led the Xbox project, said: “In the end we have reached the point where we have to make a decision. These designs usually work, and we know they are about the same price. But we really want to What I know is whether this is exciting and interesting for customers.”
Therefore, a small team of designers and user researchers brought these models to the homes of clients in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. Kujavsky added: “We will conduct 10 to 12 visits to talk to users about games and investigate how they use game consoles. Then we will measure their rooms, how far they sit from the TV, and use it for Thermal research temperature readings. Finally, we will lift the veil of these rough boxes and ask what would they think if this was the shape of the next-generation game console?”
Tower won, not only because its overall design is visually eye-catching, but also because its proportions are more practical than one might think. This box-shaped device is about the size of a commercial toaster, but because it is not extreme in any dimension, it can be placed on a shelf that is 8 inches deep.
As Microsoft began to advance this design, the team also knew that it wanted to create a cheaper version. As Spencer explained, having the most powerful console is the key to the brand, but new Xbox customers tend to choose the lower-priced combination. These are usually released later in the console life cycle, but Microsoft wants to provide it in the first place.
Starting from the design of Tower, the team simulated a device called “Slice”. Its height and width are the same as the Tower, but the depth is much smaller. It has no functions such as an optical drive, just like a slice cut from one side of the Tower. In the end, Tower became Xbox Series X and Slice became Xbox Series S, but especially in these smallest designs, details are important. Microsoft chose to highlight surprising details in the industrial design as the highlight of the game console, namely the vents.
Microsoft’s design philosophy around Xbox is called “smart geometry.” Kujavsky explained: “You start with pure shapes and express your personality through functions.” In a practical sense, this is equivalent to the visual language of squares and circles. Components like the optical drive are boxes, which is helpless. The fan is the circle, which is beyond reproach. Microsoft did not place sculptural curves on the game console to cover up these components, but instead displayed individuality through their functional shapes.
This means that fans and vents become the biggest attraction. On Series X, the vent is a stunning optical illusion. Since its edges are thicker than the inside, it sinks into the box like a small depression. But the vents are actually stacked in two layers, the outermost layer is black, and the innermost layer is green. This means that when your eyes sweep over the game console, the green ripples will show up on their own. As Microsoft’s senior CMF designer Erika Kelter explained, this is the “second reading” of the device, “inviting you to come closer and explore”. It only has two layers of plastic, but it looks like it’s electric. If the light is sufficient, you can even see the fan.
On Series S, the designers worked hard to put the fan in the right place to keep the entire game console visually balanced. For the top grate, they argued about different colors, but they actually compared the white box with the black vent to simplify the design. Kujavsky admitted: “This is counterintuitive. If you change something to a color, you might find it simple. But by adding black, we cover up hundreds of small holes here, and one big The black circle looks better than countless small circles.”
Finally, the main design work is completed around the Xbox controller. In order to reach a wider audience (ie, young players with small hands), the design team wanted to adjust the shape of the controller without losing muscle memory to tens of millions of customers. Therefore, after a lot of testing, including inviting players to the design room to try prototypes while studying carefully, the design team came up with an exquisite design. In minor adjustments, each front shoulder of the controller was cut by approximately 1 mm, and the top trigger was integrated into a more continuous curve. Kujavsky explained: “The result we want is that you pick it up without knowing that it is different. But for young people, it feels easier to pick it up.”
The future of Xbox is not just Xbox
But the most radical design decisions surrounding these new consoles may have to do with business plans. Series X is priced at 500 US dollars, and Series S is 300 US dollars. However, Microsoft took inspiration from the smartphone industry, offering a 0% installment plan, and also incentivizing players to sign up for its “game version of Netflix”-Game Pass. Through these plans bundled with Game Pass variants, users can pay $35 a month, pay two years to buy Series X, or pay $25 a month to buy Series S.
So, which part of the Xbox business is profitable for Microsoft? Is it hardware? Want to license the game software installed on Xbox? Is it a subscription service like Game Pass? These are details that Microsoft did not share, but Spencer hinted that although Game Pass is the key to the company’s long-term strategy, it has not achieved profit maximization today.
Microsoft understands that the Xbox business is much larger than the Xbox console itself, and its latest generation of hardware is only one part of the growing gaming world. Spencer said: “Microsoft is long-term in the gaming business. We hope to become a platform where hundreds of millions or billions of players can find places to play. Build walls around Xbox so you can continue your favorite experience. The only way is to buy a brand new game console this fall. But for us, this does not seem to be in line with our values as a team.”
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