If you own an Xbox One, I think you should just get an Xbox Series S. Plain and simple. It just such a low financial barrier.

I was skeptical going into this console generation – I have just built a PC, I'm trying to budget, and honestly there isn’t a compelling case for either the Xbox Series S/X or the PS5. But then the Xbox Series S price got announced at $300 USD/$380 CAD (actually ~$20 less than the direct USD conversion)...

In Canada that adds up to $430 CAD after taxes. I was able to sell my console for $225, and all of my discs for $150 pretty easily. Despite having a big game collection, roughly half of my games are now on Game Pass, a quarter I know I’ll never play, and the remaining quarter I can repurchase during a sale for like $50. So, at $375 return I was looking at $60 for the new console. What an unreal deal! For someone with a 1080p TV I don’t really feel that the Series S was a compromise in any way aside from making my disks obsolete, and for a next generation console… Why wouldn’t I buy it for like 50% of the cost of a new AAA game.

Something I keep hearing is that the Xbox doesn’t offer a lot to someone with a gaming PC, but for my use case I don’t agree. There are some games I just would rather play in front of my TV, Game Pass for Xbox is still an incredible service, and I often use my Xbox to watch media including videos on a USB. Perhaps it wouldn’t make sense to upgrade my console from the Xbox One for $630 CAD, but the $380 cost really makes the unexciting new generation and redundancies of having a PC and Xbox less relevant. And for such a low barrier to entry it’s increasingly easy to convince friends who are on the fence to pick on up and play on Xbox. I understand I’ll end up with a PS5 eventually for the exclusives, but for the single player stuff that Sony tends to offer I am more than happy to wait for a few years.

Any issues with the Xbox Series S that you foresee, or reasons why you'll choose the X over the S?