Console generations could become a thing of the past, senior director of product management and planning at Xbox Albert Penello has claimed.
Xbox X
During its E3 2017 press conference, Microsoft officially unveiled its next console, called the Xbox One X, which will have significant hardware improvements and will be able to run games at 4K resolution as well as offering performance gains for older titles.
The new machine - originally titled Project Scorpio - will be able to purchase ahead of Christmas 2017 and Penallo believes it could the last console the company releases to follow the traditional upgrade cycle as he believes gamers are now more interested in content than having the newest and latest technology.
In an interview with WIRED, he said: "I don't know what the next thing is going to be, I don't know what the future is going to hold. A lot of it has to do with when technology intersects with price, and when consumers feel that they're stretching the limits. I do think the idea we're trying to introduce is that we care about the games and that the device, whether it's a PC or an S or an Xbox One X, is just the mechanism with which you choose to experience those games. Even when we do things like Xbox 360 backwards compatibility, and now OG Xbox games, you wouldn't necessarily say that would be the most relevant thing to do, to go that far back, but I love that we care about preserving the content ... I'm not necessarily saying that [console] generations are going to go away, but thinking beyond this generation, thinking around software, is clearly where we're trying to go. We're trying to make sure it's about your content rather than the device."
Penello believes the games industry is now at the same stage as the cell phone industry, which supports multiple generations of devices that support similar software and apps.
He added: "I don't always like to use the phone example, because there are other factors at work, but you care more about your apps than the phone they're on now. That industry has moved to the point where you just upgrade your phone when you feel like it, when either the price or the screen or the camera got to where you want to be, and you just assume everything [software side] is going to work."
The Xbox One X will be released on November 7, 2017.