Game News 2.0

Rather hilariously, MSs acquisition has resulted in a load of leaks throughout the industry, and now the FTC has accidentally leaked the entire Series mid gen refresh strategy, like almost everything.

New consoles coming in 2025 2024 (I got confused by their financial calendar year), with a focus on sustainability, a connectivity upgrade (better WiFi and Bluetooth), and a move to all digital. That last one will be controversial, but that's clearly the way the industry is moving, despite loads of people complaining about it.

New controller coming too, basically copying the PS5s best feature with the increased haptics. Includes a rechargeable, removal battery.

Looks like a can of coke.

New gen aiming to launch in 2028, with all you'd expect really, like ML & AI, along with "the power of the cloud", essentially.

I'd guess that the play anywhere is just a reference to the fact that it'll connect to more devices, and it'll be easier to manage those devices, i.e. connect to more than two devices and be easier to swap between them.

The direct to cloud thing is lifted directly from Stadia, where the controller connects to the WiFi and bypasses the TV/set top box. Reduces input latency for cloud gaming, essentially.

I'd guess that there'd be a flat section, which would allow for it to be horizontal. The MS guys are very good at designing consoles, since the One S at least, so I'd have confidence that they've thought of that.

MS have looked into this before, and some of their ideas were actually pretty good, like an in-store exchange system (which might have saved the bricks and mortar chain stores), or a way to authenticate a disc by having it in a different console, although that's not as useful as a permanent swap. Mid/long term though, I can't see the next gen having a disc drive at all. The PS refresh has no drive, albeit does have a place to attach one, but I'd hazard a guess that the disk drive attachment will never drop in price, will be scarce, and might actually increase in price.

Another bit of the leak is the decision road map on the next gen console, which is pretty standard, but does have one interesting segment:

The "ARM64 decision" one, which makes it look like they're thinking of swapping processor on the console. Might have Back Compat issues then, but having been using the Apple Silicon for the last while, the difference in performance/watt is stark. Didn't think it'd be so obvious, me being a windows person for decades at this point, but there really is a huge difference in power by going ARM.

With it being Xbox and solely focused on games, they should avoid the pitfall that befell their Surface Pro X, which had none of the upsides of the ARM transition, and all of the downsides of running windows through emulation

Yes, this is pretty clearly their thinking. If the switch turned out to be another Wii U, then the conversation would be very different.