Games will arrive on Blu-ray discs that will be available for purchase at retail, but Internet activation will be required to activate the disc with the single-use code. It isn’t clear if any non-Internet connected single player or offline mode will be supported once games are activated and associated with the system or the user’s account on the system.
Tongues are already wagging that the PlayStation 4 will be a more powerful system due to the overhead that developers will have to contend with, since they have to use Microsoft-approved development libraries and apparently greater OS overhead.
One positive thing could be that Microsoft intends to offer the largest hard drive they have ever offered for an Xbox system. This means that it will be greater than the approved 320GB hard drive offering in the Xbox 360. Odds are that it will be a 500GB, but a 640GB/750GB model might be possible; sources tell us that a 1TB offering is unlikely due to current pricing.
Another question mark that remains is backward compatibility with Xbox 360 games. Since it does appear that Microsoft will be moving the Xbox Next to the AMD 8 core processor at about half the speed of the tri-core processor in the Xbox 360, backward emulation is questionable at best, due to performance issues. This means there could be no backward compatibility with the Xbox Next, sources tell us.
If the latest talk that we are hearing is correct, Microsoft will unveil the Xbox Next in April, which would be after Sony has already announced the PlayStation 4. If the rumors of doing away with used games end up as true, it could be a difficult sell to many current Xbox 360 console owners who will not want to part with the option to purchase used games.
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