History of Xbox Series X and Series S in Timeline
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Like the Xbox One, the consoles use an AMD 64-bit x86-64 CPU and GPU. Both models have solid-state drives to reduce loading times, support for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and spatial audio, the ability to convert games to high-dynamic-range rendering using machine learning (Auto HDR), support for HDMI 2.1 variable refresh rate and low-latency modes, and updated controllers. Xbox Series X was designed to nominally render games in 2160p (4K resolution) at 60 frames per second (FPS). The lower-end, digital-only Xbox Series S, which has reduced specifications and does not include an optical drive, was designed to nominally render games in 1440p at 60 FPS, with support for 4K upscaling and ray tracing. Xbox Series X/S are backwards-compatible with nearly all Xbox One-compatible games and accessories (including Xbox 360 and original Xbox games that were made backward-compatible with Xbox One); the newer hardware gives games better performance and visuals. At launch, Microsoft encouraged a "soft" transition between generations, similar to PC gaming, offering the "Smart Delivery" framework to allow publishers to provide upgraded versions of Xbox One titles with optimizations for Xbox Series X/S.
2014
Microsoft announced that the Xbox Series X/S was the biggest Xbox console launch, with more consoles sold in more countries in its first 24 hours than any previous Xbox. The record was previously held by the Xbox One, which sold more than one million units at launch. The Xbox Series S has attracted a higher percentage of new Xbox players than any previous Microsoft consoles. Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, would affirm in an earnings call on July 27, 2021, that the Series X and S consoles were the fastest selling Xbox consoles ever. Microsoft has not revealed the exact sales numbers of the Xbox Series X/S, having last revealed sales figure for Xbox consoles in 2014. However, estimates from industry analysts and exact sales from specific regions are available.
June 2018
Industry rumors of new Xbox hardware had started as early as June 2018, with Microsoft's Phil Spencer confirming they were "deep into architecturing the next Xbox consoles" at that time. The hardware was believed to be a family of devices under the codename "Scarlett", including a low-cost version following a similar scheme as the Xbox One family of consoles, with major emphasis on game streaming and backward compatibility. By March 2019, further industry rumors had led to speculation of two consoles within the Scarlett family under codenames "Anaconda" and the low-cost "Lockhart" version.
June 2019
Microsoft stated that the Xbox Series X and Series S would support all existing games playable on Xbox One (excluding those that require the Kinect sensor), including Xbox 360 and original Xbox games currently supported through backward compatibility on the Xbox One, thus allowing the new consoles to support four generations of games. To achieve this level of compatibility, Microsoft announced in June 2019 that they would no longer be bringing any additional Xbox 360 or original Xbox games into the Xbox One backward compatibility program, and they would instead be using their manpower to make sure these older games were playable on the Xbox Series X. Backward compatibility is a launch feature, with Microsoft having put more than 500,000 man-hours in validating thousands of games from the supported Xbox One library; Spencer said in December 2019 that he himself had been helping to test backward compatibility games. As Microsoft neared launch, they reopened the means for players to suggest additional games to add to backward compatibility, stating "Resurrecting titles from history often presents a complex mix of technical and licensing challenges, but the team is committed to doing everything we can to continue to preserve our collective gaming legacy."
March 2020
In March 2020, Microsoft stated that despite the COVID-19 pandemic, they expected the Xbox Series X to ship by the end of 2020, though they were monitoring supply chains and the safety of their workers. Then, Spencer believed that while the hardware will continue to ship on time, games poised for the release window of Xbox Series X may be delayed due to the pandemic. By August 2020, Microsoft committed to a November 2020 release window for the Xbox Series X, affirming the console's release was still on track.
March 2020
Microsoft planned to detail the hardware specifications and launch games for the Series X at the 2020 Game Developers Conference (GDC) and E3 2020, but the events were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft scheduled online presentations over the same days in March 2020, while the company planned to reschedule its E3 presentation. Detailed specifications were presented by Microsoft, Digital Foundry, and Austin Evans of Overclock Media on March 16, 2020. Starting in May and running until launch, Microsoft planned to have more digital events around the Xbox Series X and its games as part of an "Xbox 20/20" series. This included an Xbox Games Showcase on July 23, 2020, featuring games principally from its first-party Xbox Game Studios.
July 2020
Initially, Spencer suggested that their first-party studios' games would support both Xbox One and Xbox Series X platforms for the "next couple of years", but journalists observed that some of the first-party games introduced in the Xbox Game Showcase in July 2020 omitted mention of the Xbox One, and their websites later updated to omit mention of the Xbox One. While none of these games were believed to be launch titles, they were expected to be released within the window Spencer had previously suggested. This led to Aaron Greenberg, general manager of Xbox Games Marketing, to clarify that these games were being developed for the Xbox Series X first, leaving the choice of adding Xbox One support to their development studios as they went forward. In June 2023, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty stated that its in-house studios had "moved on to Gen 9" and were no longer working on new games targeting Xbox One.
July 2020
The existence of the Xbox Series S had been guessed before E3 2019, based on a "Project Lockhart", a second, lower-end console that accompanied Scarlett. Confirmation of the Xbox Series S naming was affirmed through early Xbox hardware accessories that some had been able to purchase. Microsoft officially announced the Series S console on September 8, 2020, revealing that it would also be released alongside the Series X in November 2020. Microsoft pointed out that the Series S had been discreetly placed in the background of previous Xbox announcement videos featuring Phil Spencer during July 2020.
July 16, 2020
On July 16, 2020, Microsoft announced that it had ended production of the Xbox One X and all-digital version of the Xbox One S in preparation for the new products.
September 2020
Both consoles have a similar user interface (UI) as the Xbox One, but use 40% less memory to improve its speed. According to the UI development team, the Home section loads in about half the time as it did on the Xbox One. Other changes include adding rounded UI elements, a more-readable font for text elements, rearrangement of certain aligned features, and improvements to the sharing functions. These changes were brought to the Xbox One system software, the Windows' Xbox application, and the Xbox mobile application around September 2020. Based on system previews, about 200 GB of space was reserved on the internal drive of the Xbox Series X for system files.
November 2020
The 2020–2023 global chip shortage prevented Microsoft from producing enough Xbox consoles to meet demand. Upon launch, both models almost immediately sold out across all retailers and in all markets. This led to scalping on Internet marketplace sites, with consoles going for as high as US$5,000. Spencer said that they had gotten a later start on manufacturing the console in mid-2020 as they were waiting for key AMD chip technology, and they had reached full production capacity by launch but were still rushing to meet sales demand, as well as having made projections on proportions of Series X versus Series S sales. In November 2020, Xbox chief financial officer Tim Stuart said shortages were likely to end in the second quarter of 2021. Starting in May 2021, Microsoft allowed members of the Xbox Insiders program to sign up for a priority list to purchase an Xbox Series X or Series S directly from Microsoft, though only a limited number of units were offered through this program. Although Microsoft was unable to produce enough units to satisfy demand during 2021, the revenue from consoles increased because the consoles had higher prices.
November 10, 2020
Both the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles launched on November 10, 2020, with the Series X priced at US$499, £449, and €499 and the Series S priced at US$299, £249, and €299. In China, the systems would release on June 10, 2021. Microsoft affirmed that 31 games would be available at launch, including those from its Xbox Game Studios and from other third-party publishers, in addition to those from its Xbox One backwards compatibility. While Halo Infinite had been planned as a launch title when the Series X console was first revealed, Microsoft and 343 Industries opted to delay its release until after the console's launch due to production issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
November 10, 2020
The Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S are the fourth generation of consoles in the Xbox series. Released on November 10, 2020, the higher-end Xbox Series X and lower-end Xbox Series S are part of the ninth generation of video game consoles, which also includes Sony's PlayStation 5, released the same month. Both superseded the Xbox One.
December 31, 2020
Daniel Ahmed, a Niko Partners analyst, has provided estimates for the worldwide sell-through of the Xbox Series X/S. The combined worldwide sales of the Xbox Series X and Series S would have reached 3.5 million by December 31, 2020. Sales would increase to 6.5 million by June 30, 2021, outpacing the 5.7 million units sold of the Xbox One and the 5 million units of the Xbox 360 in the same timeframe. Sales worldwide are estimated to have reached 8 million by September 30, 2021, and 12 million units by the end of 2021. At the end of 2022, it was estimated by Ampere Analysis that sales had reached 18.5 million. In June 2023, during an ID@Xbox presentation in Brazil, Microsoft revealed that Xbox Series X and Series S had sold over 21 million units to date, which is lagging behind its rival PS5 with 40 million units sold as of July 2023. During the hearing of Activision Blizzard Acquisition on June 22, 2023, Microsoft admitted that they "lost the console wars" and "Xbox's console has consistently ranked third (of three) behind PlayStation and Nintendo in sales. In 2021, Xbox had a market share of 16%...Likewise for console revenues and share of consoles currently in use by gamers ('installed base'), Xbox trails with 21%"
2021
Upon reveal of the Xbox Series X's vertical form factor, a popular Internet meme compared the design to a mini refrigerator. In the lead-up to the console's release, Microsoft manufactured a limited number of refrigerators modeled after the Xbox Series X exterior, complete with a disk drive handle, green interior ambient lighting, and the Xbox startup sound. Some were distributed to celebrities like Snoop Dogg and iJustine, and others were offered as part of promotional contests. In March 2021, in collaboration with Microsoft, Dwayne Johnson offered smaller mini-fridges modeled off the Xbox Series X to promote his line of Zoa energy drinks; Microsoft's Greenberg stated that this was a trial run to see if the Xbox mini-fridge would have potential sales options beyond this promotion. After followers of the official Xbox Twitter account helped the brand to win in a Twitter marketing vote-based championship in April 2021, Greenberg affirmed that Microsoft will proceed with producing Xbox Series X mini-fridges for purchase. Microsoft announced during E3 2021 that these mini fridges would be available to purchase by end-of-year holiday period in 2021. Microsoft opened pre-orders for the mini-fridge in October 2021, with plans for distribution in December 2021 in North America and European markets.
January 2021
The Xbox Game Preview program, which allows games to be released through an early access model, continued into the Xbox Series X/S line with Spacebase Startopia in January 2021.
February 2021
Xbox Series S can play Xbox One games with improved performance, texture filtering, and auto HDR support, but it does not support Xbox One X-specific enhancements. Microsoft is providing tools for developers to check the performance of their Xbox One games on the Series X and S consoles, which can suggest optimizations "as easy as changing three lines of code" to support the improvements in backward compatibility. In February 2021, Microsoft introduced FPS Boost, a feature for select backward-compatible games that the company said can improve the framerate of these titles on the Xbox Series X and Series S by two to four times. This is a feature that Microsoft's engineers must prepare for each game, with five games supported initially and more to be rolled out over time. Microsoft developed FPS Boost after finding that for many backward compatible games, the CPU and GPU on the newer consoles frequently entered their idle states even with the other enhancements in place, and so they sought ways to use the unused processing cycles to further enhance the older games' performance. As of May 2021, about 97 games were updated to support FPS Boost.
March 2021
In March 2021, Microsoft started testing the Auto HDR feature with Windows-compatible games and computers that meet minimal requirements supported through DirectX.
June 2021
AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution, an image upscaling technology competitor to Nvidia's deep learning super sampling (DLSS) to enable higher resolutions and framerates, was added to the Xbox Series X/S in June 2021.
September 2021
Both consoles support Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos technologies. Dolby Vision was initially limited to streaming apps at launch, but was released for games in September 2021.
October 2021
As with previous Xbox consoles, Xbox Series S and Series X use the Xbox network platform for online services. It supports the Xbox Game Pass service, which allows subscribers to download games from an on-demand library. In October 2021, Xbox Cloud Gaming—a component of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate which allows users to stream games from Microsoft servers to Xbox consoles, PCs, and mobile apps—was upgraded from Xbox One S-based hardware to Xbox Series X-based servers, enabling faster server-side loading times.
November 2021
Certified sales data are available in certain regions through providers, such as GfK in various regions of Europe. Famitsu also provides specific sales estimates in Japan. In the UK, 155,000 units were sold on launch day, two-thirds of which were Xbox Series X consoles. Sales in the region would reach 310,000 by the end of 2020, over 1 million by the end of 2021, and 1.8 million by the end of 2022. The Series X variety accounted for 43% of all the Xbox Series consoles sold over 2021 in the UK. In Japan, 16,247 Xbox Series X and 4,287 Xbox Series S systems were sold during the launch week, for a total of 20,534 units sold. Sales in Japan would cross 116,000 in November 2021, outselling the lifetime Japanese sales of the Xbox One in under a year. By the end of 2022, Xbox Series X/S reached 400,000 units sold in Japan. In Spain, there were 10,500 Xbox Series X and 3,600 Xbox Series S systems sold during the launch week for a combined total of 14,100 units sold. By the end of 2020, 30,850 Xbox Series X and S systems had been sold in Spain. 96,000 units were sold in Spain in 2022.
November 2021
In November 2021, Jordan Ramée of GameSpot acknowledged that Xbox Series X and S had begun to see higher-profile console-exclusive releases since their launch (such as Forza Horizon 5, and the third-party titles The Artful Escape and The Big Con), and that Smart Delivery was a "crucial" feature of the consoles—praising the system for being seamless and automatic unlike PlayStation 5, whose user interface "did not make it abundantly clear which version of a game you were choosing to download and play, occasionally resulting in players accidentally putting the PS4 version of a game on their PS5." He also felt that migrating from an older Xbox One was easier than migrating from PS4 to PS5, citing Smart Delivery, automatic synchronization of save data, and maintaining the same user interface.
March 2022
The DirectStorage API was released in March 2022 for Windows-based computers for graphics cards that support DirectX 12 and NVMe SSDs, though games must be programmed to take advantage of the DirectStorage API. DirectStorage was planned to be a built-in feature along with Auto HDR for Windows 11 at release in late 2021, as well as offered within Windows 10.
March 2022
Xbox Series S and Series X support "Quick Resume", which allows users to suspend and resume up to three games at once. Games can also be resumed after a reboot of the console. The March 2022 update added the ability to "pin" up to two games to Quick Resume, keeping them suspended unless otherwise closed manually, or the game must be updated.
March 2023
Microsoft has urged developers to develop games to release on both the Series X and Series S with feature-to-feature parity, despite the latter's limitations. In March 2023, Remedy, the developer of the game Control, said that the system with the lowest specs (the Xbox Series S) dictates the features used because games have to be able run on the hardware and that optimization is nowhere near as simple as lowering resolution and texture quality. Spencer said that split-screen co-op is one area that certain games, such as Forza, cannot be used as the Series S, and thus has limited their own first-party releases.
June 2023
Critics praised the Xbox Series X/S for the hardware improvements over Xbox One and Microsoft's emphasis on cross-generation releases, but believed that the games available at launch did not fully use the hardware capabilities. In June 2023, Microsoft revealed that over 21 million Xbox Series consoles have been sold worldwide.
June 2023
The consoles support external storage through a proprietary SSD expansion card inserted into the back of the console, which was manufactured exclusively by Seagate Technology on launch and limited to a 1 TB size when first released. Later versions included 512 GB and 2 TB versions and were released at the end of 2021, while expansion cards manufactured by Western Digital were released in June 2023. As with the Xbox One, the consoles will also support external USB storage, but only backward compatible games (which can also be transferred directly from an Xbox One console) will be able to run directly from external USB storage. Xbox Series X- and S-native games must be stored on the internal SSD or an expansion card in order to be played, but they can be moved to a USB storage device to make room for other games.
August 2023
Larian Studios, the developers of Baldur's Gate 3, did not officially announce an Xbox Series X/S version due to technical issues relating to split-screen co-op on the Xbox Series S. This led to a rumor that the game was a PlayStation console exclusive. Larian Studios denied the console exclusivity and said that Baldur's Gate 3 might get released on Xbox should the problems get fixed. Larian discussed the matter with Spencer, and in August 2023, the studio said it would release Baldur's Gate 3 for the Xbox Series X and Series S without the split-screen co-op feature.
September 01, 2023
An updated Xbox Series S with a matte black finish and 1 TB of storage launched on September 1, 2023; the internal design remains otherwise unchanged.
September 01, 2023
Microsoft announced a 1 TB Xbox Series S model in carbon black, which was released on September 1, 2023 at a price of US$349.
2024
Unrelated court documents from the 2022 court case FTC v. Microsoft included plans for refreshed mid-generation consoles planned to be released in 2024. The updated Xbox Series X, codenamed "Brooklin", would feature a cylindrical design that drops the optical drive, draws less power, increases internal storage to 2 TB, and improves wireless connectivity with Wi-Fi 6E. The updated Xbox Series S, codenamed "Ellewood", would retain the same design as the current Series S, reducing power consumption and adding Wi-Fi 6E and 1 TB of internal storage. Both console refreshes are planned to ship with a new Xbox controller, codenamed "Sebile". The new controller will be named the Xbox Universal Controller and will include a rechargeable, swappable battery.
June 2024
As of June 2024, the Xbox Series X and Series S have sold a combined 28.3 million units worldwide.
October 15, 2024
Microsoft released refreshed versions of both consoles on October 15, 2024, which included a 1TB Xbox Series S in a white finish, an Xbox Series X in white without the optical drive, and the 2TB Xbox Series X Galaxy Black Special Edition. The new Series X models use a redesigned motherboard with a smaller system-on-chip, and replace its vapor chamber cooling mechanism with copper heat pipes. The new models were reported to have slightly reduced power consumption.