The series X is so much better than the PS5 in pretty much all regards except for the exclusives. Microsoft went balls to the wall with Gamepass and other value adds that Sony simply can't compete with. I mean, they just literally bought Bethesda yesterday and made it a Microsoft studio like it's nothing.
However, my PC will play the same games as the Xbox, so it's pointless for me to buy it. Now that the Yakuza series is on PC as well I don't have any reasons to go with PS5 either.
I'll hold off for now, until there's an exclusive I really can't live without, but since all Microsoft games will be launching on the XBX and PC it's unlikely I'll be getting that one. It's certainly a great choice if you don't have a decent PC, and much cheaper than building said decent PC too.
Gamepass seems like a no-brainer but as someone who didn't pay attention to gaming for so long, I couldn't list the exclusives of either MS or Sony's PS4. But I still get a feeling of FOMO knowing that most, if not all, of the One X/Series X games will be on PC. And while I don't game on Windows all that much via Boot Camp, it still feels a bit bad that MS considers PC and Xbox gaming to be sort of the same thing, minus the difference and variance in hardware capabilites (gaming PCs vs work PCs vs an Xbox).
Gamepass feels like it would be too much of a good thing, like choice of games, that I'd start games and never finish them in favor of trying out a new game and eventually getting bored of the whole thing. Although, they are bring EA Access to GP so that means more casual games like sports games, which I don't really get bored of. But more story-driven games, I can see myself getting stuck and bailing.
One thing I wonder is what MS thinks what version of the Series owners of the 360 and One consoles and their games are going to buy. If you go the S route, you have no disc drive to play older games you've amassed since the 360 started, 15 years ago, unless you re-purchased them digitally. Or you spend $200 more and get the X but even then not all games are BC so you'd likely want to keep your older consoles. Or move on from them and the games entirely.
And the S is starting to feel like and worse and worse value. If storage is going to be an issue with the size of games, the S has half the storage of the X. An expansion storage option is $200, from what I've read, which is also the price difference between the S and X.
So for $499 you either get a Series X, the most powerful console that has 1 TB of storage and a disc drive
or you get the Series S with inferior hardware and 500 GB more storage than an X and still no disc drive.
I've read about using an external drive to simply store SX games or run One games, so that's always an option that is much cheaper, but the disc drive still feels like a necessity for someone like me who plans on buying used games from the One era and catching up on those.
But my original plan still stands: get a One S hopefully for a steep discount on Black Friday as retailers try to get rid of old stock and use that for X-amount of time before upgrading in a few years when the SX have their failures and MS fixes them.
Also, does the size of the Series S bother you at all and leave you concerned about proper cooling? When I saw a few videos of reviewers getting the dummy units, they were shocked at the size of the Series S. That made me think they were expecting something bigger than what they unboxed and it made me think that there may have been some serious compromises to get all of that advertised power into such a small footprint. I know there's the giant vent on top that memes have been made about but is that enough? Aren't the components shoe-horned in there to make it fit in that small form factor and no matter how good the cooling is, that still takes a toll on the components?