Eurogamer, a place that deals in rumors and generally deals fairly well in them, has found out that the new Xbox, whatever that may be called, has actually been pushed up from 2014 to 2013 due to Nintendo’s reveal of the Wii U.
Microsoft is rumoured to be preparing a reveal of its next Xbox at E3 2012. Eurogamer has recently had this claim backed up by a number of game industry sources.
Eurogamer has also heard a 2014 release of the next Xbox was planned by Microsoft, but this has now been brought forward to 2013 as a result of Nintendo’s confirmed 2012 launch of the Wii U.
Additionally, sources have indicated to us that larger publishers and developers already have target specs of both the next Xbox and PlayStation to help them with their development.
So, with target specs, are developers really ready to embrace the next generation? Reaction seems to be mixed, some becoming comfortable now with the tools they have and seeing areas where they would really like to be able to push growth, with others saying they’d like a few more years, no doubt in large part because of the massive amount of money it takes to develop on current hardware, not to mention next generation gear. It’s all well and good for AMD to say the next generation can handle Avatar-like graphics, but Avatar wasn’t exactly cheap to produce. Quite an interesting read, and it brings up some real questions.
We know the Wii U is more powerful than the current generation, and by all rights significantly so. But it looks like the next Xbox/Playstation are going to be shooting for the very top end of current PC’s, which is a couple generations of GPUs away from the Wii U. So, will this cut on Nintendo’s head start mean they loose third party support from the onset? Will the install base they manage in that head start mean they can hold on to ports from the more powerful systems? I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait.
