Today’s PCs are already offering more - and the cloud is not the answer.
This was allegedly a vision for Xbox One, except it bore little resemblance to the final product.
Kinect glasses, anyone?
The revised Series consoles in the leaked PDFs are another matter entirely.
Xbox Series S effectively remains unchanged on the outside, bar improvements in sustainable materials in its manufacture.
The Xbox One era Southbridge retained for Series hardware is replaced while wireless I/O gets a nice upgrade.
Xbox Series X gets a more thorough revamp.
That’s if it can, of course.
However, based on what’s shown here, it’s difficult to find much excitement.
What’s interesting here are the timelines, which again emphasise how long it takes to create a console.
There are two key elements to Microsoft’s next-gen plans and neither are particularly inspiring.
Remember ‘the power of the cloud’?
Can Azure really spin up that many cloud instances to ensure that games actually work?
Internet connections have improved but not to the extent that everyone everywhere (or even a majority?)
could get a good experience.
In short,almost everything we said about this concept back in 2013remains the same today.
PerhapsXbox’s collaboration with Hideo Kojimawill be the proof of concept we really need.
For me, the concern here is the lack of vision.
For me, it’s the obvious nature of this vision that is concerning.
Of course we want all the DLSS stuff - but what’s next?
The design choices presented in the document for the new consoles are arguably too limited.
The thing is, it’s not AMD delivering that innovation.
As the release ofCyberpunk 20772.0 demonstrates, it’s literally years behind the state of the art.
A collaboration with Nvidia is the obvious choice.
Everything Microsoft wants to achieve with ML in its 2028 console is already happening on Nvidia hardware right now.
Hopefully, as Phil Spencer says, these are not the real plans.
