Microsoft Kills The Xbox One And A Half!

Recently I wrote a post regarding a comment made my Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft's Xbox division.  In the comment he talks about what he sees as the future of console gaming, how that console cycles of 6 or 7 years could be a thing of the past, that in order for them to remain competitive with our PC master race brethern in terms of tech and at the same time not to lose the capability to continue to enjoy our old games as well as being able to play the latest up to date releases on the same machine.  If you want, you can check out the article HERE.

This little announcement by Mr Spencer caused a massive stir in the realm of the Internet and  rumours that Microsoft were working on an updated version of the Xbox One, or the Xbox One.5, started to appear on just about every Website (including this one) related to games or the industry.  Now the thing with rumours is that they have a bloody terrible habit of snowballing out of control and that's exactly what happened when "Xbox Next" appeared on the LinkedIn page, as an active project of David Gardner, who is part of the Xbox design team.  After this, as you can imagine the Internet started to go into meltdown and the situation wasn't helped when more rumours started to surface that Sony was also working on an updated version of the PS4, a version that could, depending on where you read about it, display both games and media in glorious 4K.  I'll do more on Sony and their rumoured PS4K at another time, for now we'll stick to Microsoft.

At Microsoft's recent Build 16 conference, Phil Spencer, who kinda started the whole rumour mill about the stupidly named Xbox One.5 in the first place, finally put an end to every ones fun when he stated that he's not a fan of the idea at all, he had the following to say.

"I'm not a big fan of Xbox One and a half. If we're going to move forward, I want to move forward in big numbers. For us, our box is doing well. It performs, it's reliable, the servers are doing well. If we’re going to go forward with anything, like I said, I want it to be a really substantial change for people — an upgrade."

Then following this on Monday, in a conversation with IGN, Microsoft cleared up the whole "Xbox Next" LinkedIn rumour, and pretty much ended all speculation regarding any possible Xbox One and a half.  

“Xbox neXt was an old internal team name for a group that worked on releasing Xbox One and is not related to a future console."

For me, that pretty much is that.  Microsoft may have ideas going forward in ways to keep the Xbox One relative and ahead of the curb. This may include the cloud and the promise back when they introduced the console to the world, that for every Xbox One under your TV at home, there would be 3 more in the cloud to back it up.  This promise has yet to materialise but Crackdown 3 may change all that, it uses the cloud for multiplayer and so far they have clocked up to I think 14 Xbox Ones, to crunch the numbers in the cloud for the city wide destruction in the games multiplayer modes.  Time will tell if the cloud ever delivers in any significant way on the Xbox One, but with the rumoured PS4K waiting in the wings, the clock is certainly ticking and ticking fast for Microsoft to maybe really showcase the real power of its Azure cloud on the Xbox One.