Last week’s special episode of the Xbox podcast didn’t stand out for its addictive pace, but it certainly wasn’t poor on information. Just think of the confirmation of the arrival on consoles of the competition of some first party titles, the date of Diablo IV on Game Pass (March 28) and the possible arrival of a portable Xbox and the mention of hardware news – presumably related to an intergenerational model – by the end of the year. In addition, there has been talk of a new Xbox already in the works.
In this regard, Sarah Bond, who became president of Xbox after the promotion of Phil Spencer to head the entire Microsoft Gaming division, did not limit herself to mentioning the new console.
We are obviously referring to the massive leak of information that laid bare Microsoft’s plans for the future of Xbox during the debates for the approval of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. And if that’s the case, the technical leap Bond is referring to could involve the integration between local hardware and the cloud, exploited to increase the power of the console. And it’s a technology that Microsoft has been working on for a long time.
Some may remember Crackdown 3, the open world designed to take advantage of the cloud according to environmental destructibility in the Wrecking Zone mode. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned – just think of the abandonment of the creator of the series and the consequent loss of the Cloudgine engine – and for this reason few were surprised by a final result far from what was shown with the GamesCom 2015 demo. But in the meantime the world has moved on.
As network infrastructure and technologies for integrating cloud and on-premises hardware evolve, we may eventually be ready for such a breakthrough. Or, in any case, the time could become quite ripe in time for the arrival of the new Xbox, according to leaked documents on the net scheduled for the end of 2028.
