Fresh off the presses over at my officially unofficial rumor mill, it seems the future of the Xbox has emerged.
If the rumors are to believed, we’ll be getting the official details straight from Microsoft at this year’s E3 press conference. That’s not all though as some details about the yet to be named Xbox Next have seemingly been leaked. First off, it’ll be playing Blu-ray, support DirectX11, 3D, multi-display output, and 1080p HD. A “Kinect 2″ functionality is also rumored to be integrated directly into the console itself. Better yet, the GPU will come from the AMD 6000 series. Mass production of the GPU is scheduled to start sometime at the end of 2012 with a system release date targeted for October/November 2013.
Here’s the odd thing. Supposedly, it’ll be able to block used games from being played. Obviously this would be a huge loss to gamers and could potentially anger a large portion who rely on the cheaper priced games. Not only that, GameStop would certainly be pissed as well as it’s cutting into their business. I don’t have to say how a move like this helps developers. Thinking about it, I’m not exactly sure Microsoft could pull this off, but it’s definitely going to be a source of controversy if true.
According to reports, the Xbox 720 will be at least 6 times more powerful than the current 360, which is 4 times as powerful as Nintendo’s WiiU as that is rumored to be 2 times as powerful as the current Xbox. I’ll let that sink in for a moment as I realized I threw around a lot of numbers. With Nintendo most likely going to pull the curtain back at E3 this year, hopefully Microsoft will follow suit with their system. Now the big question is what is Sony got cooking to counter these two.
