Details on Gen 10 Xbox planned for 2028 leaked in court documents

Cloud-Hybrid games and potential switch to ARM architecture

Marco Wutz | Sep 19, 2023

Details on Gen 10 Xbox planned for 2028 leaked in court documents /

Thanks to the current court battle between Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), we not only got the confirmation that the Gen 10 Xbox is planned for a 2028 launch date – even early technical details have now been revealed in yet another unsealed document.

“Develop a next generation hybrid game platform capable of leveraging the combined power of the client and cloud to deliver deeper immersion and entirely new classes of game experiences. Optimized for real time game play and creators, we will enable new levels of performance beyond the capabilities of the client hardware alone,” Microsoft described its vision for the Gen 10 in one presentation slide shown in the court documents.

Gen 10 Xbox presentation slides

Microsoft presentation slide on the Gen 10 Xbox. — US Courts / Microsoft

Microsoft's list of some of the key decisions about the Gen 10 Xbox.

Another confirmation of the planned 2028 launch.

Cloud and AI are key components of Microsoft's next gen strategy.

An overview of projects involved in Microsoft's next gen vision.

This presentation is from May 2022 and was submitted to court in October of that year. It revealed that the key decisions about the technical specifications of the next gen Xbox would be made in Q1 of 2023 – so we can assume that those decisions have been locked in by now.

One area requiring such a call is the console’s CPU architecture, where a switch to ARM64 was considered. Of course, we have no way of knowing the outcome of that internal debate, unless that result will be published by the court as well. While signifying a technical leap, such a switch may make backward compatibility a bit more difficult to achieve.

Another key aspect of the coming Xbox console will be Cloud-Hybrid games, a vision Microsoft had originally stated for the Xbox One – technical limitations, however, thwarted this ambition. It seems likely the company wants to make another attempt with the Gen 10 Xbox, combining the powers of local hardware and cloud technology – a move that potentially has both benefits and disadvantages, and which indicates that Microsoft may do away with physical discs entirely.

However, it’s too early to say exactly what that Cloud-Hybrid element will entail in detail.

Published court documents also revealed the planned all-digital Xbox Series X refresh and leaked a whole bunch of unannounced Microsoft games.

Published Sep 19, 2023

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg