The future of console gaming is just around the corner. Both Microsoft and Sony have announced that their next generation consoles will be releasing this year.
The consoles promise to reach new benchmarks that both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 had never seen, such as having games that run at 120 frames per second and its graphical settings implemented at 8K resolution.
Most people look to spend their money on one console and the history of console prices tells us that these won’t be cheap.
According to The Verge, Executive Vice President of Gaming at Microsoft Phil Spencer confirmed that the expensive $500 price tag on the Xbox One was a mistake which the new console will not repeat.
“I would say a learning from the Xbox One generation is we will not be out of position on power or price,” Spencer said.
Gamers who are fans of older video games on the previous generation of Xbox can play them on the new Xbox.
According to an article by Will Tuttle, Xbox Wire Editor-in-Chief, gamers will be able to play thousands of backward compatible Xbox games.
Tuttle promised that backward compatibility will be better on the new console because of faster load times, more reliable frame rates and higher visual fidelity.
Sony also confirmed backward compatibility despite the PlayStation 4 not supporting it. But according to tech entertainment website BGR, the PlayStation 5 will only run around 100 PlayStation 4 games, which will not compete against the amount the Xbox Series X will supply.
Microsoft also decided to make its Xbox exclusives become playable for their PC fan base by having a Windows version.
One of their flagship games, “Halo,” is known for being an Xbox exclusive and is now on track to become playable on all PC platforms.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection was ported to video game digital distribution platform Steam and Halo: Infinite was announced for PC.
This might seem like this move makes Xbox exclusives pointless to buy, but sharing games with PC doesn’t make the small amount of exclusives Sony has more acceptable.
According to a PC Gamer article which quoted the console to be a “monster gaming PC,” Paul Lilly praised the console’s 8-core processor.
“This essentially breaks up physical cores into virtual cores, or threads, to crank through workloads more efficiently,” Lilly said.
This makes the Xbox Series X an accessible and powerful gaming PC packaged as a console with an attractive price which makes the console itself a competitor against gaming PCs.
