Internal emails from Microsoft have appeared online following its court battle with the FTC, revealing how the Xbox manufacturer reacted to the announcement of the PS5 back in March 2020, and the price increase applied by Sony a few years later.
Xbox’s former head of platform engineering and hardware, Liz Hamren, discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Sony’s console during the email compared to Xbox Series X/S, where they highlight a clear advantage of the PS5’s SSD.
[Mark]Cerny talked at length about the move to SSDs and the advantages for game developers and consumers. They have optimized for raw higher raw throughput (2x ours with slightly better hardware compression and associated performance improvements) as opposed to a more integrated streaming architecture enabled by Sampler Feedback Streaming.
Hamren noted that Cerny “spent what seemed like a disproportionate amount of time on audio innovations,” and that the expandable storage plans of the PS5 are “similar to us in reality due to minimum size and speed requirements.”
Elsewhere, emails also revealed Microsoft’s reaction to the PS5 price hike in 2022, with Tim Stuart, Xbox’s CFO, contacting executives Phil Spencer and Amy Hood following the announcement. Here, they noted that Microsoft had “anticipated this and are moving quickly toward a plan now that we’ve seen confirmation.”
The PS5 was released in November 2020 and has shipped over 40 million units worldwide.
[Source – The Verge]