What will the next Xbox do differently, and when will it do it? Here’s our best guess.
[Update: Former PlayStation chief, Andrew House, has been talking about the future of consoles at GamesBeat Summit in California recently. Though House wasn’t willing to go into specifics on the next PlayStation itself, he did say that he thinks physical media will be around for all consoles for some time to come, thanks to the need to continue breaking into new markets. One would assume this is something that would also be relevant to any future Xbox console.
In his interview, House said, «I don’t have any firm knowledge on this, but my sense is that you will see the disc around in the industry for a while. If you’re going to tap into some of these [developing] markets, then allowing for that more traditional physical purchase model as an option is probably no bad thing.»
Despite this, though, House also believes that streaming will be big in the future of gaming — an opinion which ties neatly with Microsoft’s Phil Spencer’s who emphasised the need for a ‘Netflix for video games.’ This would be, one would imagine, a natural extension of the download-based Xbox Game Pass in the next generation .]
It’s been five years sine the release of the Xbox One and in that time Microsoft has really managed to turn things around for the platform.
After a somewhat difficult launch, marred by fan displeasure at high price points, poorly communicated initiatives and an ill-received design, Microsoft’s decision to listen to its fans and be more transparent about its intentions has been a positive one. Now, Xbox One S consoles are reasonably priced, looking sleek and selling better than ever. And now that Microsoft is making a native 4K power play with the Xbox One X, we think the future looks bright for the Xbox line.
It’s not easy, however, to guess where it might go next.
Recently, hardware developers (Microsoft in particular) have been favoring iteration which suggests that the Xbox Two may not be quite as large a leap forward as we’d usually expect from a new console generation.
Microsoft’s own Head of Xbox Games Marketing said in an interview with Engadget in 2016 that for Microsoft “the future is without console generations,“ and that ”We think of this as a family of devices.“
So, perhaps rather than seeing a console that’s leaps and bounds ahead of the last being released every five to six years, we may have to get used to incremental improvements to hardware every two to three years instead. Improvements which will, most important, remain capable of supporting older games to prevent a consumer schism.
Incremental technology improvements doesn’t mean no new console designs, though. Windows Central’s Jez Corden recently revealed on his Twitter profile that the next Xbox console is already being designed and that work is well underway, to the point where it even has a codename (although he neglected to share what this is).
The next Xbox is already being designed. July 11,2017
That said, work hasn’t gone so far that we can expect to see the console any sooner than 2019. According to Corden, 2 years would be too soon to expect the new console but it would likely still be backwards compatible with the rest of the Xbox family. Interestingly, 2019 to 2020 is around the time that analysts are predicting Sony will launch the PlayStation 5.
We think it’s unlikely that Microsoft would let Sony launch a brand new console without answering with its own within a year, but we don’t think the company would try to beat Sony to the post given Microsoft’s first foray into true 4K gaming hasn’t even been on store shelves even a year yet.
That won’t, however, stop us from thinking ahead to the next Xbox and what it’ll bring.
What will it be called?
The hardest part of this future-gazing is actually trying to guess what the console might be called, given the naming progression that’s come before. Microsoft isn’t going to abandon the Xbox brand anytime soon, surely, but the subtitle is a little harder to pin down.
If it’s a brand new console generation it’d make sense to call it Xbox Two, but Xbox 720 made a retrospectively perplexing amount of sense at one point so let’s not be too confident in that.
If we’re going to really get our tinfoil hats on, looking at the naming progression we can see the latest console is the Xbox One X. If X were to be read as ten, the next console would be the Xbox One II or Xbox II (2). Okay, we’re just kidding. Regardless,Microsoft is a hard company to predict when it comes to console naming. What will it be capable of?
What’s slightly easier is predicting the features that are likely to appear in this new Xbox.
The Xbox One X is a huge step forward for Microsoft, bringing native 4K gaming and near-PC power into a console. It’s currently the most powerful console on the market so where can Microsoft go from here?
We can only imagine. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do; join us won’t you?
A powerful console focused on games
We like to think Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons from the difficult launch of the Xbox One. The Xbox One didn’t have the advantage of being the only HD console option on the market like the Xbox 360 did, and additionally its launch ended up being marred by a Kinect bundle that pushed its price way higher than it should have been.
As a result, the PlayStation 4 took (and has maintained) a commanding lead in terms of market share.
Microsoft has definitely addressed a lot of these issues with the Xbox One X. It’s a piece of hardware that’s almost entirely focused on games, and it’s not bundled with any superfluous hardware. In fact, Microsoft’s gone so far as to drop the Kinect port entirely. We imagine this focus will continue into the future.
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Budget and premium options
With the One S and the One X Microsoft is embracing both an iterative and a tiered model. The company is not only launching incrementally better pieces of hardware over time, but it’s also supporting previous versions of the console and allowing them to exist as budget options.
As a case in point, the One X is still expensive (much more so than the PS4 Pro), but the Xbox One S is still being presented as a worthy and attractively priced 4K upscaling alternative that will still be capable of playing all the same games, not just from this generation but the previous generation too.
However, after each console has had its chance at being the budget model, they’ve each fallen away into obscurity. We’ve already seen this with the original Xbox One, and it’s likely that the Xbox Two will eventually have the same effect on the Xbox One S.
We imagine Microsoft may want a certain degree of market saturation for the Xbox One X (or at the very least 4K TVs) before launching the Xbox Two but when the console does launch it’s less likely to feel like the same leap that moving from Xbox 360 to Xbox One did.
Trial and error, rather than a jump into the unknown
In some senses we feel that it’s reasonable to assume we’ll be slowly drip-fed a lot of the technology that will end up in the Xbox Two.
This has the big advantage of allowing Microsoft to establish what works and what doesn’t work over time rather than having to take a big leap of faith with a brand new piece of hardware.
VR and AR support is likely
We’ve learned that certain things are unimportant for consoles this generation, like motion-sensing and touch-screen, but the new technologies like VR and AR are proving to be very exciting fields for developers.
Microsoft has already confirmed that the Xbox One X will support Windows 10 virtual and mixed reality headsets but it’s not being forceful with pushing them.
