Next gen Xbox already in development reveals secret Microsoft document UK WIRE

Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles — What will the next next gen Xbox look like? (pic: Microsoft)

A heavily redacted legal document sent to the US Federal Trade Commission reveals that the next gen Xbox is already in the design stage.

The current generation of consoles has been made so peculiar by the pandemic that many still refer to the Xbox Series X/S and the PlayStation 5 as next gen. The last gen Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are slowly being edged out of the release schedules though, with more and more current gen-only games being released as the months go by.

It’s a well established industry convention that as soon as a company finishes work on one console they immediately start work on the next, even if it won’t be released for another five or six years, and already we have proof that the next gen Xbox is well underway.

As you might guess, this proof comes from the ongoing legal exchanges between Microsoft and monopoly investigators, in this case the American FTC (Federal Trade Commission), where a document talks about the 10th generation console and even refers to it by its codename – although that, unfortunately, is redacted in the public version of the document.

Microsoft codenames for hardware are often those of cities and this one seems to be around 15 characters long, so it may be possible to guess what it is (we don’t think it’s Milton Keynes though).

There’s no more to be learnt from the document that, but it’s interesting that both the next gen Xbox and the PlayStation 6 have now been referenced in the ongoing battle over whether Microsoft is allowed to buy Activision Blizzard.

This has led to speculation on whether this generation will be unusually long or short but while it’s impossible to tell from the information being made public, because so much of it is redacted, both Sony and Microsoft do already seem to have fairly concrete plans.

That’s precisely why the FTC was asking Microsoft for more information, as it’s suspicious that it’s not being entirely open about its future plans. The FTC, like Sony, believes that, despite all its protestations, Microsoft will attempt to leverage ownership of Call Of Duty to give it an unfair advantage.

If anything, the FTC has been more sceptical of the acquisition than many other antitrust bodies, although its position has shifted a number of times and Microsoft’s insists that the lawsuit to block the buyout has no chance in court.

Whether that’s true or not it’s certainly slowing down proceedings and while the $69 billion deal probably will go through eventually there’s currently no end in sight to the legal wranglings.