Xbox Series X/S review: Beautiful, powerful—but whatcha gonna play?

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  A series of Xbox Series boxes. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]

This year's newest Xbox consoles, Series X and Series S, are the least imperative devices in the history of the Xbox ecosystem.

This is arguably a very good thing and a direct result of Phil Spencer righting the ship as the chief of Microsoft's Xbox division. As a public-facing Xbox figure, he's emphasized a major company philosophy since taking over in 2014: open up "Xbox" access to as many devices as possible. Windows 10 PCs, a cloud-streaming service, consoles old and new: they're all largely compatible with the same Xbox-branded software these days, and a single subscription service delivers over 100 games on each of them.

Like other power users at Ars Technica, I don't technically need either new console to play Xbox games. Between my powerful PC and my Android smartphone, I can already play plenty from the Xbox ecosystem, especially first-party games (with help from the aforementioned Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service, that is). The folks at Xbox seem like they're fine with that: play how I want to, so long as it's in their playground some of the time.

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