Xbox Moving 'Full Speed Ahead' on Next Gen Console (windowscentral.com) 33
Microsoft is moving "full speed ahead" on its next generation console, an internal email from Xbox president Sarah Bond has revealed. From a report: The email, obtained by Windows Central and verified to be genuine by Microsoft, also announced the formation of a game preservation team at Xbox. "We are moving full speed ahead on our next generation hardware, focused on delivering the biggest technological leap ever in a generation," Bond said, reiterating comments made in February when the console's existence was officially announced. No further information was shared regarding the hardware itself, nor when fans might be able to buy it, but documents leaked in 2023 suggested Microsoft plans to release the next Xbox in 2028. Regardless, with Microsoft seemingly making its development a priority, it will likely be available sooner rather than later.
Alongside it looking to the future, Xbox also appears committed to the past and present. "We have formed a new team dedicated to game preservation, important to all of us at Xbox and the industry itself," Bond said in the email. "We are building on our strong history of delivering backwards compatibility to our players, and we remain committed to bringing forward the amazing library of Xbox games for future generations of players to enjoy."
Alongside it looking to the future, Xbox also appears committed to the past and present. "We have formed a new team dedicated to game preservation, important to all of us at Xbox and the industry itself," Bond said in the email. "We are building on our strong history of delivering backwards compatibility to our players, and we remain committed to bringing forward the amazing library of Xbox games for future generations of players to enjoy."
It will be called the Xbox Series AI (Score:4, Funny)
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NFTs are so 2021.
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So MS will launch theirs around 2026, is that what you mean?
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Gosh, how do I get in on this amazing ground floor opportunity?! I am afraid of missing out!
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NFTs are so 2021.
What's New Is Old Again :))))))
Woohoo! I've aged out. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've owned consoles from the Coleco Telstar with the classic bar burn-in right through to a Series X. But I'm done! My console gaming has dropped to basically zero. I even discontinued Game Pass... which for me was an absolute bargain of a service.
Except that I don't know how well it bodes for Microsoft (or Sony) that my generation is aging out. After all, we're the generation with the most disposable wealth. We grew up in the glory days of gaming when it was normal to pay $60 for a new title. And I still love my beautiful wide screen TV in the living room.
Given the widescale move to mobile and the desire of people to get huge amounts of content for pennies, I don't know that a nex-gen console can be profitable if folks like me just don't adopt the next iteration.
Good luck to them. They delivered a lot of years of fun for me. But I'm skeptical of the future of the whole ecosystem.
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Ehh, console gaming has definitely been more in the "lower cost" side than say PC gaming which is what the older crowd like us leans more into.
PS5 has sold 19m+ in the USA and the XBox has moves 14m+ units in the USA, consoles are still a pretty lucrative market and while consoles and PC are moving ever closer together the experience they offer just cannot be replicated on mobile, especially for the "gamer" crowd.
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consoles are still a pretty lucrative market
The consoles, themselves, have never been especially lucrative (they are essentially loss leaders). The real money is in the games and services.
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Save it for the semantics dome, E.B. White
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Ooh, burn!
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I don't know if you can play PS4 titles directly on a PS5 or not, but with the Xbox Series, you can play all of the Xbox One titles natively (and some of the 360/OG Xbox games). If Xbox continues this trend, I assume the next Xbox will have beefier specs and maintain compatibility with all of their previous titles.
Yes, I
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Yeah for sure, if you are sitting at ground zero on gaming, as in, own nothing and you want to play the hottest new release game, the cheapest and smallest amount of friction is to go buy a PS5 or Xbox and you can be playing that game within 60 minutes of bringing it into your house, all for $600 with a 70$ game purchase.
Now a PC brings plenty of intangibles and extra features (it's still a computer, mod support, so many settings) but good luck getting something as reliable, easy to work with and with the g
Re:Woohoo! I've aged out. (Score:5, Informative)
"but I can absolutely understand someone just syaing "let me just play the game"
And in the PS2 days, this was absolutely the case and I completely understood this argument...but especially in the PS5 and XBSX era...I'm less convinced.
In the PS2 era, it was "buy disc -> insert disc -> play game".
In the PS5 era, it's "buy game -> wait for game to download (God help you if you only have a 50Mbit/sec connection like all the LTE providers in my area are pitching) -> wait for day-one patch to download and install -> buy season pass (because God forbid the game actually be fun in the first five hours of gameplay of the game you just spent $70 on) -> buy in-game currency (because God forbid games with loot drops actually drop loot instead of being purchased) -> try to find a co-op partner at your skill level to get through a particular section that's basically-impossible to do solo (because God forbid a game *I* spent $70 be playable without *someone else*) -> play game.
Now, to be fair, a whole lot of that is the fault of the developers who design games this way. To be even more fair, the issues with season passes / battle passes / lootboxes / macrotransactions also applies to plenty of PC games (God forbid I play Warframe for ten hours without managing to score even a single new weapon), but the PC experience has gotten way better as Steam and other launchers abstracted away most of the install headaches, as well as games basically being written to target DirectX or Vulkan instead of targeting the hardware directly (R.I.P. Voodoo3D). Meanwhile, most of the worst elements of PC gaming are on consoles now: onerous DRM, always-on internet connectivity, massive downloads, post-purchase monetization, ship-then-patch instead of actual QA, day-one DLC...
Consoles have lost most of their advantages, which isn't to say PC is better, only that they're basically as bad as each other at this stage.
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I mean yeah gaming on a whole has gotten more complicated but as you mentioned PC games are still on the same path of Day-1 patches, DRM, anti-cheat, battle passes etc
At least still with a console there is no hardware to mess with, no general OS like Windows or Linux or OSX to deal with, no worrying about performance settings or upgrades, no considertion to minumum spec requirements, generally just a lot less to think about. These things have gotten better on PC for sure but even in the abstraction sense
Re: Woohoo! I've aged out. (Score:2)
"At least still with a console there is no hardware to mess with, no general OS like Windows or Linux or OSX to deal with, no worrying about performance settings or upgrades, no considertion to minumum spec requirements, generally just a lot less to think about."
Most of that stuff I have to think about anyway because I use my PC for things other than web browsing. The rest is simply not possible on the console so it's not an advantage. Having to buy a new console to get an upgrade is not better than being a
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Your ps5 experience is very different from mine.
I don't know why you're buying in game currency or need a random online buddy to get through games designed for solo success or buying game pass or any of that other stuff. I've never done any of that stuff. I just play.
I buy game, download game, play game.
Sometimes there is a patch. Same as for PC games. You complain about console game download times yet talk about Steam on PC. I don't know about the others but many ps5 games can be streamed or sometimes
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PS4 titles play on PS5 just fine, and in many cases the game is upgraded. A good example is The Last of Us Part 2 for PS4 which downloads a huge update to take advantage of the PS5 (better graphics, UHD, less "pop-in" of scenery, etc.).
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[MOST] PS4 titles play on PS5 just fine, and in many cases the game is upgraded. A good example is The Last of Us Part 2 for PS4 which downloads a huge update to take advantage of the PS5 (better graphics, UHD, less "pop-in" of scenery, etc.).
Fixed that for you. There are still many PS4 games that are pretty choppy on PS5 because they aren't optimized for PS5 and are locked into a lower frame rate. A good example is The Division.
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Yeah isn't backwards compatibility all done via some form of emulation today? I know both are x86 so maybe there is just an abstraction layer but I don't think it's a 1:1 hardware match anymore.
I remember back in the day where the 60GB original PS3 model was the "best" one since it had the actual physical mainboard guts of a PS2 built into it for total backward compatibility.
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They're using more or less PC hardware, but the APIs are more aggressive in targeting the exact features of said hardware. That creates a problem when the same game is released on a newer platform which doesn't have those specific GPU features.
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Hmm, I play a fair number of ps4 games on my ps5 but haven't experienced that yet. Is it mostly certain genres where performance tuning is more critical like fps?
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...convenience of consul gaming...released for the consul...The consuls themselves....
The correct words are "console" and "consoles", not "consul" and "consuls".
How about new controllers? (Score:3)
The bigger issue I see is that XBOX hasn't improved the controllers. PS5 controllers with audio and force feedback are so much better!
Euphemism (Score:1)
Translates roughly to:
"We're hoping to re-sell old things to you after we sue everyone connected to Xenia."
Focus will be on software (Score:2)
What comes next? (Score:3)
I wonder what comes next for consoles. We seem to have passed the point of diminishing returns on all the things that used to drive hardware updates. The main factor limiting how good a game looks is now the developer's budget, not the hardware's abilities. Same with the length of the story, the size of an open world, etc. Better hardware won't matter to those anymore.
Maybe the next generation will be all about AI, and you'll need lots more computing power to drive the NPCs. The technology for that is advancing, but will it lead to better games?
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I don't need more than 640k, either.
Xbox president Sarah Bond (Score:2)
mhm.
"Sarah Bond is an Economics graduate from Yale University and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School"
That explains a lot.