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When Microsoft announced both Scorpio and the upcoming Xbox One S, there was plenty of concern that the company might have harmed sales of its current Xbox One family (including the S) by announcing the much more powerful Scorpio console too early. While Scorpio isn’t expected until Christmas 2017, it’s also expected to be an extremely powerful console — possibly more powerful than Sony’s own PS4 Neo.
Microsoft, it seems, is aware of this problem and has a solution already in mind to counteract it. The general manager of Xbox Services, Dave McCarthy, told the Daily Star that “Some of our retail partners today do trade-in programs and that’s definitely going to be partnerships we continue to move going forward. We want to make that transition as smooth as possible.”

“The compatibility thing is a big deal,” McCarthy said. “Because you feeling you have to give up your games isn’t a good feeling, so we take that angst out of the equation. We’ll try partnerships with our retail partners to smooth it even more with trade-in programs and things like that.”

It’s not clear what kind of trade-in value Microsoft might offer or whether there will be a difference between the Xbox One and the Xbox One S (presumably yes, but how the company chooses to value that difference at trade-in is its own question). Geek.com reports that the Xbox One can currently be traded in for $80 cash or $100 store credit. That’s not much cash for a system that retailed for $500 just three years ago, and it doesn’t look as if GameStop much cares if you have Kinect or not.


Gamestop trade-in values for consoles (values in store credit).

Scorpio’s hardware loadout is still uncertain. The simplest move for AMD and Microsoft would be a straight port of the current Xbox One CPU to 14nm. Simple, however, doesn’t always mean cheap. The Xbox One uses a GCN-derived GPU and AMD’s low-power Jaguar core as a CPU. Jaguar was a solid CPU design when it debuted three years ago, but AMD opted not to continue iterating on the core and didn’t port it to 20nm or 14nm.

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