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Let's crank out the rumour mill on this Tuesday morning, because it's time to speculate on the next-gen. According to some reliable sources over at Kotaku, the next-generation Xbox console from Microsoft, is as much as six months behind in its development cycle.
On top of that, a handful of next-gen developments have been canned or put on hold, in order to bring the Xbox to bear on time. It's not known at this time what those extra curricular projects were, but they could be things like the Illumiroom, the Kinect goggles that sounded similar to the Oculus Rift or maybe even the Kinect 2.0 itself. The latter of those three seems the least likely to be put on hold however, since with our current understanding of the Durango machine, Kinect 2.0 will be a big part of its launch feature set.
We're pretty sure that the 720's controller will be pretty familiar though
Those same sources are suggesting that in comparison to Microsoft's troubled situation, Sony is much further along and much more likely to be able to meet the Christmas 2013 deadline.
These new rumours only add to the pile of previous ones that don't paint Microsoft in the greatest light. We've also heard suggestions that the next-Xbox will be an always-on machine and it won't support used games.
As usual though, this new rumour needs to be taken with a giant pinch of salt, as it's far from confirmed.
Kitguru Says: With so much back and forth rumour-mongering for this-next gen of consoles, I can't believe it's going to be another five months or so before release. It feels like we've been talking about the new consoles for way too long already.
Welcome to Microsoft closed ecosystem gulag concentration camp… errr… I mean Xbox 720:
1- You don’t own anything anymore. You only rent the right to use, for a limited time only.
2- The day MS discontinue server support, your console, accessories and games are worth ZERO dollars, forcing you to upgrade, on MS terms.
3- 500GB HD on all version of the console + mandatory HD full install for every games = MS will discontinue physical media. No more DVD or blue-ray games, you’ll be forced to download all your content from the MS store. That also imply they will ban the use of second hand games, which means you can’t resell any of your games to finance the purchaser of a new one.
4- If anything of the following stop working for more than 3 minutes, no games for you, no matter how long it take to fix being 1 hour, 1 day or 1 month: Xbox NIC card, modem, router, ISP connection, anything between your house and Microsoft server, Microsoft servers themselves or if your console get banned by mistake.
5- You pay for EVERYTHING, even to use something as basic as Youtube (requires gold membership).
6- Pay-to-win DLC content borderline necessary to finish the game. Games end up costing many times more their original price.
Microsoft clearly intend to enslave you with a lock down renting business model where you have no power or choice anymore. They want recurrent business to make you pay something every month, for the rest of your life.
Even if only half of all this is true, I’ll make the bold prediction that Sony will wipe the floor with the 720 for this round. This business model is so suicidal, I’ll go as far as to say this could very well be the end of Microsoft in the video game industry.