Originally posted by: pennhunter
How about IceBox? To calm fears of overheating.
I think MS next console will have flash based cartridge based games, in it's own file format. I think it will have a DVD drive to play 360 games also.
As neat as that kind of sounds... 25gb flash cartridges are not nearly as cheap for production as an optical disc.
However, it'll be intriguing what route they go.
They could develop a Steam-like platform, upgrading the Live system to include full retail game releases. But will that really be feasible? I mean, sure you can download games. But with the expected sizes of games for next generation, will people really take kindly to the idea of downloading a 25gb or larger game every time they want to buy a game? Having physical copies is great, especially for manuals. I don't want to load up a virtual manual.
And I don't think the U.S. broadband backbone is quite ready for that. Same reason we aren't seeing companies launch HD streaming that is Blu-ray quality with 19mbps AVC and 4.5mbps 7.1ch surround sound.
I am curious to know if Microsoft will finally acknowledge the need and incorporate a Blu-ray Drive as standard in the next gen console. For movies but more importantly games.
As far as the name of the next system, I bet they'll go a Nintendo route with naming.
They'll keep the Xbox brand name, but the second name will be unique. They went with "360" last time so they could keep it a number, and more importantly, make it a "3" of some sort to confuse the idiots that purchase solely on system iteration. Microsoft feared it being called Xbox 2 when there was a Playstation 3 coming soon.
I don't expect them to keep with the pattern though. Xbox 1080 sounds kind of reasonable, far better than Xbox 720, but still sound terrible when trying to figure out... what's the point of the name? The 360, as was said before, was a solution to a problem and a way of giving it a unique-enough name that wasn't a generic release number either, like a 2 or 3.
I expect it'll be called Xbox, with the specific name being pretty much open at this point. Like the "360" was a name, it'll be replaced by "BlahBlah", so "Xbox BlahBlah". Curious what they will name it, and how they will spec it out.