With the Xbox 2 incoming, should you buy an Xbox One?

Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, or whatever they choose to name their Project Scarlett prototype, is on its way.

The company’s latest and most powerful console should be in the hands of eager consumers for the holiday season of 2020, likely to mean November or December 2020.

But where does it leave its older sibling? Is it still worth buying an Xbox One or the Xbox One X, S or even the all new Xbox One S All-Digital addition?

We don’t have the answers you seek, but we do have a bunch of well thought out reasons for why a brand new Xbox One is a good or bad idea.

5 Reasons why you should buy an Xbox One

1. There’s plenty of life in the Xbox One yet

We won’t be getting our hands on the as-yet-unnamed Xbox console until late in 2020. Before then, we’re going to see a release for Fifa 2020, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Gears 5, Watch Dogs: Legion and a little thing called Cyberpunk 2077. These are just the biggest titles in a final 18 months jam-packed with top quality releases.

These titles alone will easily fill your time until you have a new Xbox, and there will also probably be a ‘grace period’ when hit games are available on both the next-generation console and your current gen model.

Also, if this is your first console of this gen, there’s several Halo titles, The Witcher 3, Forza Horizon 4 and many others to explore. Honestly, the death of a console generation is the best chance to go back and play the classics, so perhaps you should just plow through the best Xbox One Games

2. Backwards compatibility means you’ll be able to take all of your games with you

This one may only apply if you buy your games digitally, which is what we’d recommend if you’re just starting out in the Xbox ecosystem in 2019.

Microsoft hasn’t revealed the full plan for backwards compatibility for Project Scarlett. But they have claimed that the hope is for every Xbox One title to be playable on the next-gen console. This means that if you are, for example, midway through Cyberpunk 2077, or even a 2020 Call of Duty game when you get the new Xbox, it should work straight away.

3. The Xbox One is cheap now

Right now, you can pick up the all-digital Xbox One S for £169.99, which gives you 1TB of storage space, and Minecraft, Forza Horizon 3 and Sea of Thieves pre-installed.

The Xbox One X, the most powerful console around for the moment, but you can get it for £339.99, and in addition to pumping out 4K gameplay, it’s also packing a 4K Blu-ray player. It’s a cracking piece of kit for the price, and will function as a solid media player with access to YouTube, Now TV and Netflix (among others) even when you’re done with the games.

4. Cheap Xbox One Games

Games don’t hold their value for long. You can get Forza Horizon, FIFA 19, Spyro the Dragon and Battlefield V – some of the biggest hits of last year – for under £20. Red Dead Redemption 2 will set you back just £30, with that price likely to fall more before the end of this year.

With a new console generation coming, expect games to get cheap and stay cheap, until after the launch of whatever form Project Scarlett takes, at which stage you’ll be able to grab as many games as you want for budget prices.

5. The Xbox Game Pass

If ever there was a good reason to get an Xbox One as its younger sibling is beating down the door, the Xbox Games Pass is it. It gives you access to nearly 200 games, including some of Microsoft’s most recent releases, including Crackdown 3, Forza Horizon 4 and many more.

Monthly, Xbox Game Pass costs £7.99 and if you’re a PC gamer, this subscription will give you games across your PC and Xbox. It’s great for treating the library like a buffet, instead of having to commit and buy every specific game you want to try out.

4 Reasons you should not buy an Xbox One

1. The price is high if you’re not going to game often

The Xbox One family is cheap now, for sure, but no amount of money is worth it if you’re going to plonk it down beneath your TV and ignore it for the next year.

The Xbox One is now one foot in the grave after a long and remarkably decent console generation filled with hits, but none of these hits will matter at all if you don’t play them, at which point a shiny new Xbox One X could just be wasted cash.

2. If you have a PC, it’s not really worth it

This generation of Microsoft’s series of exclusives has been somewhat underwhelming, with a few notable exceptions. Every essential Xbox game can be played on the PC as part of Microsoft’s initiative to release their exclusive games day and date for the PC through the Windows Store.

So, while I think you should definitely play Forza Horizon 4 and plow about an England built only for cars, you can play it on the PC. This will likely be the case for every game Microsoft releases moving forwards, so it’s hard to think of a reason why you wouldn’t merely double down on keeping your PC up to date to play their best games there.

If you only have a PC, you’ll miss out on console exclusives, but these are now few and far between.

3. If you have a PS4, it’s probably not worth it either.

Ditto on the poor exclusives, and while you’ll miss out on Microsoft’s exclusives, this is the other half of the coin: you’re getting all the PS4 exclusives, but you’ll miss out on a few games that Microsoft keeps their hands on, which is gutting.

Still, Xbox One exclusives will be available on Microsoft’s next-gen hardware through backwards compatibility, so if you do buy an Xbox Two, you can still play them in the future.

4. If you have a PS4 and a PC, it’s really not worth it

Do I need to go into detail on this? All you’re missing is the ability to play your games on the most powerful system available. In theory, you shouldn’t be missing any games you can’t get anywhere else, outside of a few of the older Xbox exclusives that didn’t make it to the PC before Microsoft’s PC / Xbox One parity initiative.