XBOX Rumor Roundup!
Everyone knows that there is another XBOX on the way. But other than the fact that a successor to the XBOX 360 will someday be on store shelves, facts about the machine have been very hard to come by. Earlier this week, two big rumors hit the net, and we’ve bundled them together in a cute little package, just for you. Yes, you. Read on for the details.
The first rumor about the XBOX 720 (as it’s rumored to be called) concerns its chipset and release date. Initally reported on by Fudzilla, and translated into human speak by IGN, the machine will be up to six times as powerful as the XBOX 360, and will ship in October or November of 2013. It’s been my experience that most rumors pertaining to technical specs, especially ones this specific, tend to be true. A holiday 2013 release window also seems plausible. Whatever the final horsepower of this machine turns out to be, let’s hope they’ve solved the heating issues that plagued the 360 a few years ago. NO MOAR RROD KTHX.
The second rumor comes from Kotaku. It starts off pleasent enough, then takes a sharp right turn into the fires of Hell. According to “games industry sources,” the XBOX 720 will use Blu-Ray discs instead of DVDs. Makes sense. The collapse of the HD-DVD format left XBOX 360 users with no way to watch high definition movies on disc, and the lack of storage capacity has surely hindered XBOX game development. The second part of the rumor… brace yourselves …is that Microsoft is planning to incorporate a system into their next console that would prevent the playing of used games. The author of the Kotaku article states that his source does not know how such a system would be implemented, only that it is being planned. Well that’s just great. It’s no secret that publishers have been trying to undermine the used game market for years, but a console manufacturer including some kind of DRM system in their hardware would be a huge step in a very consumer-unfriendly direction. Hopefully, this particular rumor is false. But you know the saying: where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Sigh… Once again, that was Fudzilla, IGN, and Kotaku reporting.
