The next Xbox will come in two variants — an affordable one and a higher end version?

One of the things that have always intrigued me about consoles is just how games just work on them. With PC gaming, you might run into performance issues, lack of optimizations, and that sort. But consoles, well they usually just play. That might be coming to an end though.

It seems that Microsoft has gotten a taste for releasing consoles with different performance to deliver different experiences to consumers. The upcoming Xbox will apparently be offered in two variants, currently codenamed Lockhart and Anaconda. The latter will feature higher specifications, while Lockhart sports mid-range specifications.

The Anaconda is expected to tout AMD’s upcoming Zen 2 CPU cores and Navi GPU, which will be quite a massive upgrade from the hardware currently featured in the Xbox One X. The Anaconda will replace the One X, while Lockhart replaces the One S in the current Xbox lineup.

The problem I forsee when two different consoles are launched at once is that it will definitely lead to issues whereby the cheaper console won’t be able to deliver as good an experience as the pricier one. Isn’t that the issue which consoles are supposed to solve?

Just one console which delivers a great experience should help reduce the price via economy of scale, thus giving everyone better performance at a lesser price. Just why would they want to release two different hardware configurations and create fragmentation?

Pokdepinion: Fragmentation in the console market, hmm…