Microsoft’s Xbox held its annual trade show as part of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, more commonly known as E3, on Monday (June 13).
After offering condolences to the victims of the shooting in Orlando, Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox went on to announce two new consoles – the Xbox One Slim and Project Scorpio.
“The Xbox One Slim coming this August,” explained Shannon Loftis, the general manager of Microsoft Studios. “It’s the smallest and actually the most beautiful console that I’ve ever seen. It’s tiny, it’s powerful, it renders 4k over high definition video, HDR games and it’s 299 US which is super exciting. Then of course, next year, we’re talking about Project Scorpio which is the most powerful Xbox we’ve ever made, true 4k gaming, ultra high definition VR, just a monster of a box.”
Spencer on stage explained that the announcement of Project Scorpio at the event was so developers of games and VR (Virtual Reality) can start programming now ahead of its release in the holiday season 2017.
Loftis said “Right now, VR is a little bit fragmented and what we’ve heard consistently when we’re speaking with developers about their goals and dreams with VR is they just want power. They want power to explore what they think it’s capable of and the fact that our Windows machine and being the Windows 10 company, it’s given us the chance to really understand what development requirements developers have for VR so we’re not interested in necessarily dominating the world with a single VR solution but what we want to do is unlock the potential for this technology for people that are interested in telling stories that way.”
Alongside the upcoming gaming releases, the gaming company also announced that products bought on Xbox One would now automatically work on Windows 10 as well and that Xbox Live will have several new features including an arena for competitive gamers.
“We’ve consistently listened to every channel possible to find out what gamers are looking for, what choices they want to make, what choices they want to be available and we use that as the primary basis to figure out what we need to do next. It’s a beautiful symbiotic relationship and it also turns out that we have more fun,” said Loftis.
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2016
