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Microsoft Gaming have just shared a ton of new details about their Xbox strategy moving forward, after many weeks of silly rumours and speculation about them going third-party.
Xbox executives Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond and Matt Booty announced that four Xbox exclusives will be coming to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch including Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded and Sea of Thieves.
Phil Spencer was very clear that PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch players should not expect more Xbox games on their platforms, namedropping Starfield and Indiana Jones, but he also did not entirely ruled it out, saying that they as an industry should not ever rule out games going to other platforms.
But probably the biggest news from the Business Update is the confirmation that a next-gen Xbox console is in the works. In addition to new hardware, including a new controller and console options, which are on the way this Holiday, Xbox also stated that their next-generation Xbox console is well underway and will be the greatest technological leap ever in a hardware generation.
"Xbox hardware will also continue to be a flagship experience for players and for game developers to launch games on with a robust and innovative multi-year hardware roadmap, including more console and controller options for you this holiday," Xbox said. "What we’re really focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation."
The new console and controller options that Xbox mentioned are probably the leaked digital-only console and the brand-new Xbox controller with haptics and other improvements.
According to the leaked FTC files, Microsoft planned to start announcing this hardware in May 2024 but it looks like they changed their plans and will now launch both at the end of the year.
The next-gen Xbox console will have two SKUs and apparently, and one of them is a dockable handheld that can run games natively. Microsoft said in a blog post today that they "see a lot of opportunity in different types of devices, and will share specifics on our future hardware plans as soon as we are ready,".
To us, this pretty much suggests that Microsoft are working on a handheld device but we shall see. Microsoft Gaming boss Phil Spencer recently liked a couple of tweets linking Microsoft to a handheld Xbox device so we'd say that something is certainly brewing and we're excited to get some official announcements on this one.
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