In less than a week It will be 22 years since the first generation Xbox hit the European market, March 14, 2002 (its US debut was a few months earlier, on November 15, 2001). It seems like yesterday (I still remember the day I went to buy it at the Centro Mail store where my sister-in-law at the time worked and gave me a special discount) but then a new console came out to compete with Sony, Nintendo and, although hardly with Sega, they have become a vast ecosystem of the gaming world.

Four generations have reached the market so far, all with some mid-life revisions: the original 2001 model, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Xbox One, and current Xbox Series, and of course its video game subscription service, Game Pass, and its cloud gaming. platform, Xbox Cloud. And both its games and its services are clearly successful, but we can’t say the same about its consoles, because only its second generation, the 360, managed to make its rival from this generation (seventh), the Playstation 3, quite complicated.

The One fiasco meant that since then the shadow of doubt constantly looms over the future of Microsoft’s consoleand the fact that its numbers don’t even come close to those of the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, the two most recent generations, only served to reinforce the feeling that one way or another the Xbox as a console wants to see its days numbered.

Recently on a special edition of the Microsoft Gaming Ecosystem podcast Phil Spencer has confirmed that there will be a next-gen Xbox, and that the plans for it are quite ambitious, as Spencer himself has stated that it will be the biggest technological leap in history, which fits quite well with the theory that it will be powered by Intel and NVIDIA. Now, how much of this is already defined? And what can we expect after that?

Peter Moore, an executive with an extensive history in the gaming sector who was part of Microsoft at the time, gave an interview to IGN stating that The future of the Xbox is currently the subject of much discussion at Microsoft. Now, this wouldn’t be a situation exclusive to Redmond, as he assumes similar discussions are also taking place at Nintendo and Sony.

In the case of Microsoft, the conversation is taken, however, from another point of view, given the improving Xbox sales figures, we must also add a growing ecosystem of alternatives to traditional consolessomething in which cloud gaming is key, and its strong position in the gaming market, especially consolidated by the acquisition of Zenimax and Activision Blizzard King.

Moore does It is certain that there will be a next generation console, which was confirmed by Microsoft itself, but the key will certainly be what happens after it. And yes, it will of course be affected by its sales, but also by the evolution of the market itself, as well as the development of plans, announced last month, to start bringing its exclusives to other platforms, which would sacrifice console sales, but in return has the potential to substantially increase revenue from game sales .