What Does The Xbox World Report Mean For Gaming?

Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
| The video game industry has gone from a mole hill to a mountain in no time flat, Chris DiMarco is your Sherpa as you endeavor to scale Mount “Everquest”

What Does The Xbox World Report Mean For Gaming?

For those currently unaware, Xbox World magazine--one of the major print sources of Xbox information--is about to go out of print come December 12. But before they fold up, they look to release a whole lot of information about the upcoming Xbox release, the result of tapping every source they have. What they're looking to reveal spells a lot of trouble for pretty much everyone else in the video game industry, and some very good news indeed for the gamers out there.

The reports suggested some very important points about the upcoming device, which still technically does not have a name. Though it may be the Xbox 720, or the Xbox 3, or just the Xbox, it's the features that matter and this one will be stuffed with them. Set to emerge on the new gaming device are Blu-ray disc playback capability, support for a new Kinect and augmented reality glasses, and a whole new controller.

Additionally, Xbox World dropped the dime on hardware specs on the developer kit, including a 16 core processor (four hardware cores with four logical cores each) and eight gigabytes of RAM, which puts it on par with many of the higher-end gaming PCs.

The Blu-ray playback option is a good one; as much as the streaming market has gained in recent months, there are still plenty of places which simply don't have Internet access sufficient to fuel the option. That's going to give Microsoft that little extra edge, especially as it tries to become a fully-featured entertainment platform.

It's got the power to compete with most anything out there, a Blu-ray option to make it better featured against the entertainment market, and a variety of new features that haven't been seen at the market level. This is going to put a lot of burden on both Sony and Nintendo--the Wii U, power-wise, is barely keeping up with the current generation and Sony's got problems enough as it is--to keep up. Though Nintendo can keep playing to the casual gaming crowd, and that will give them something of a bit of an edge, but a major offering from Microsoft is going to give the market a bit of a fight. Gaming PCs will even be hard pressed to stand up against that, if the price is at least close to right.

With E3 just a few short months off, we may be seeing this come out before too much longer. But based on what may be coming, there could be plenty of trouble rising for the video game market.
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