Phil Spencer explains why the Scorpio is coming in late 2017

We recently received the specs for Microsoft's Project Scorpio, and while talking about the upcoming console with Gamasutra, Xbox boss Phil Spencer explained the reasoning behind releasing the console a year after the PlayStation 4 Pro.

"We thought 4K TVs would get to scale in the middle of this generation," he explained. "So we designed a console for 2016, and a console for 2017. We were kind of working on both plans simultaneously. And at some point, we got to - let's just call it greenlight. For what we would do in 2016, and we sat around a table not too dissimlar from this and said, 'I think we need to do more than what the silicon is that's available in 2016 at a price point that a console customer would want to pay.' So that's when we stopped that effort."

"Sometimes I get in trouble when I talk about Sony too much, but, the choice they made on PS4 Pro, I totally get that choice, from their perspective and what they wanted to go do," he continued. "I've said it publicly and I've said it privately, I think they've built a good 2016 PS4 Pro. With the silicon that was available, they picked the parts that made sense to go and put together a console in 2016."

"But the point on not wanting frame-rate to drop when you go to the higher box, right, if the developers want to push resolution, to say to the player 'here you bought this higher-end console, let me show you higher-end resolution,' you don't want the frame-rate to drop. And that was something we didn't think we could deliver with the silicon that was available in 2016."

"So some of it was time, as certain things come down in price - some of them not as quickly as we would like. And some of it was hardware capability from our silicon partners, that allowed us to go do that in 2017."

Do you think this strategy is a smart one?