The Xbox Series S will outsell the Series X, says Phil Spencer

Xbox head Phil Spencer has said that he expects the Xbox Series S to outsell the more powerful (and expensive) Series X, during the lifespan of this coming console generation.

That comes from Spencer’s recent interview with Kotaku, where he revealed that he expects the Series S to outsell the X by the end of the generation.

“I think, over the generation, our expectation would be that price really matters and that you would see the Series S sell more,” said Spencer.

Of course, Spencer still expects the Series X to sell well  – particularly at launch, with both systems (and the PS5) likely to sell in huge quantities.

“I think we’ll sell every unit of both of them that we can deliver,” said Spencer.  “I think demand is just going to outstrip supply of pre-orders. For us and PlayStation, I think that the manufacturing supply chain is going to dictate [market] share more than anything else.”

Spencer expects the Series X to be the favourite at launch, with early adopters being more likely to opt for the more powerful machine. However over time, the lower-cost Series S is expected to attract a wider audience.

The Series S arguably has more appeal with casual players when compared to the X, and doubles as a more affordable entryway to the Microsoft ecosystem to PS5 owners looking for a second console.

In the same interview, Spencer also commented on the recent ZeniMax purchase, saying that they didn’t buy the company in order to make its library of titles exclusive to Xbox  – though did not comment on whether or not future titles will be exclusives.

Spencer said that it would be possible to recoup the  $7.5 billion it spent on ZeniMax without maximising sales by putting future Elder Scrolls titles on Playstation, going on to state the motivation behind the purchase.

“This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that,” Spencer said. “Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games.”

Spencer did say, however, that given the reach Microsoft now has with Game Pass on PC, console and mobile, it’s not needed to bring games to other platforms to make the ZeniMax deal “work.”

“I don’t have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us. Whatever that means.”