Xbox Brasil holds a special broadcast for the Xbox Series X|S launch

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Numbers first: on November 10, 2020, Microsoft put the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, the brand’s new generation of consoles, on store shelves. To mark launch week, the Xbox Brasil YouTube channel held a special broadcast celebrating the launch in the country, with trailers, details of the devices, gameplay, special messages and code giveaways. In the invitation, Microsoft called the two models “the most powerful consoles in the world” and closed with “come to the green side of the force”.

The full broadcast was recorded on the official channel:

The two consoles, translated from the jargon

The Xbox Series X is the top-of-the-line model. It uses a custom 7 nm AMD chip, with an eight-core Zen 2 CPU and a 12.15-teraflop RDNA 2 GPU, plus 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and a 1 TB NVMe SSD. Microsoft’s goal was to run games at 4K and 60 frames per second, with support for up to 120 frames, and the device has a disc drive.

The Xbox Series S is the cheaper, digital-only option, with no disc drive. Its GPU has about 4 teraflops and its SSD is 512 GB. It was designed for games at 1440p and 60 frames per second, with upscaling to 4K and ray tracing. In practice, this means the same generation of games at lower resolution, in a much smaller body.

Both models brought Quick Resume, which keeps several games suspended at the same time so you can pick up where you left off in seconds, and backward compatibility with almost the entire catalog playable on the Xbox One, including the Xbox 360 and original Xbox titles already adapted. Microsoft announced 31 games available at launch. The new controller gained a Share button, for screenshots and recordings.

What came next

Days later, Microsoft declared that it had been the biggest launch in Xbox history, with more consoles sold in more countries in the first 24 hours than any previous model. Both devices sold out almost immediately in practically every market, and the lack of stock stayed with the generation for months. In February 2021 came FPS Boost, which raises the frame rate of selected older games on the new consoles. One promise fell by the wayside: the 8K support announced for the Series X was never delivered.