Microsoft, give consumers the FPS counter on the front of the Xbox Scorpio too

Listen, no one is going to buy what’s promised to be the most powerful gaming console ever created to not know the frame rate of each game in real time. What would be more comforting than to be able to look at your console while playing and see a nice, round “60” staring back at you to let you know your money wasn’t wasted?

Nothing, that’s what. I want a solid, concrete way to know the console is doing what I want it to do at all times. I need that sweet, sweet gratification of knowing games look and run better on my console of choice when compared to my past console or the competition. Which is why I want that front-facing OLED display from the development kit on the retail hardware, and I won’t hear a word otherwise.

We’ve known about the screen’s existence for a while, although its function seemed to be speculative.

“The kit sports a real-time clock and battery backup, as well as an OLED screen with navigation button on the front of the box and five programmable buttons,” a Gamasutra story about the development kit stated. “This seems like a small but meaningful quality-of-life improvement for devs: if you’re working with Scorpio dev kits, you should be able to set them up to display useful data like, says, frames per second, at a glance.”

And now we get to see an idea of what the screen will look like in action, and it’s super sexy.

If this system is aimed — at least in part — at the sort of PC gamer who has looked down their nose at consoles in the past, this would be a great selling point. The screen would be the sort of data overload certain PC gamers love to see in order to feel secure in their purchases, to make sure they are always exceeding their minimum requirements for performance and speed.

I’m not the only person to think so.

You would be able to tell the Xbox Scorpio was worth the money because there are the numbers right there. You could also maybe program the screen to say other things, like “Sony? More like BALONEY!” and then give you a high-five on Twitter.

Sure, adding an OLED screen to the retail system may add a bit to the cost, but that’s what we’re here for. We want to get the best, and we want to know we got the best. That’s the whole point of Scorpio. And it’s not like other devices haven’t added OLED screens to give the user more information. Look at the latest Macbooks, for example.

I don’t want to have to argue about how games feel or how it’s all about having “fun” and “enjoying yourself with friends and family” when it comes to games. I want the strong, pleasing embrace of hard data. Nothing else will do.

Microsoft, make this happen.