The biggest news from BIG? The Xbox Series S is doing exactly what Microsoft hoped it would do

If you are a regular on this site, you know our opinions on the xbox series s at this point: the console offers some of the best values ​​in gaming. With its low purchase price, coupled with a cheap Game Pass sub, it offers some of the best bang for your buck in all of gaming. No doubt about that.

And that’s a message that seems to be getting through to the audience. In a presentation about ID@Xbox at the largest gaming festival in Latin America, BIG, Leonardo Barros Barreto (Director and Production Management Partner at Xbox) revealed that 48% of Xbox Series S players are new to the game. Xbox ecosystem. You can click on the relevant slides of the program in the link.

Simply put, the Series S plan is working: its low price and ease of use is attracting new players. The presentation at BIG revealed that the largest proportion of new players entering the Xbox environment come from the US, closely followed by Brazil and Mexico. We also learn that there are over 21 million Xbox Series consoles in circulation right now (fewer than the 38 million PS5s that Sony has confirmed).

However, this does not mean that Xbox Series S is good news for Microsoft. Larian Studios recently came out to say that because the machine is less powerful than its generational peers on the Series X and PS5, it would not release Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Xbox ecosystem. It’s the first time a developer has publicly acknowledged that the Series S’s lack of power is holding back gaming. But I don’t imagine it will be the last.

“We have run into some technical issues in the development of the Xbox port that have prevented us from feeling 100% confident in announcing it until we are sure we have found the right solutions,” Larian said. “Specifically, we haven’t been able to get split-screen co-op to work to the same standard on both Xbox Series X and S, which is a requirement for us to ship.”

But this tradeoff should be worth it for Microsoft: getting a massive influx of new players into the Xbox ecosystem via Series S is no small feat. And once those players get in, it’s easier to convert them into subscription-paying Game Pass members, an important part of Xbox’s current strategy (even if some publishers apparently aren’t too happy about it).

There’s still a hot debate about whether or not the Series S is holding the current generation back; we have even seen both sides of the argument on this very website. But whether or not the cheap but weak promise of the Series S is bad news for the industry at large, there’s no denying that it’s making a splash at Microsoft.