Phil Spencer is looking to take a “go big or go home” approach for E3 2019 and it seems that the Xbox boss has a couple of surprises for us this year. He teased us in his recent comments regarding the upcoming event and it seems that we will not only get to see new games at E3 2019 but we will also be able to learn about other products and services such as Xbox Anaconda, Lockhart and Project xCloud.
In a recent podcast, Spencer talked about how he has spent some of his time testing the services that the company is going to offer in the future and that he has also seen some games that developers have been working on. He teased us as follows:
I saw what Playground is working on next, I saw what Rare is working on next, and their continued success with Sea of Thieves.
For starters, we now know that Playground Games and Rare are working on some new games. We do not know what these games are but we will be able to learn more at E3 2019. There are rumors that Playground Games is working on Fable 4, which is a game that fans have been asking for but you need to take this information with a grain of salt unless it is confirmed by Microsoft. Keeping in mind how big of an announcement this is, I do not think that Microsoft is going to talk about it till E3.
Spencer also talked about how this is going to be the biggest E3 for the company and that all the company is going all in. The following is what he had to say in this regard:
This is going to be a fun E3 for us… we had a discussion internally. Should we go big? Should we save some money? No, we’re going to do our thing and we’re going to go and be as big at E3 as we’ve ever been. And I love that opportunity to be with our fans and the industry.
The company is still deciding about how much of the roadmap it is going to share with the fans at E3 2019 and it seems that Spencer has plenty of great stuff to talk about. He teased the upcoming Project xCloud as well as other hardware that could be the Xbox Anaconda or Lockhart. Right nothing is for sure and his words can be interpreted in many ways but the following is what he had to say:
We’re still going through some of the discussions on how much long-term and how much near-term [games] do we talk about… I’m a proponent for being as transparent as can be… I feel really good about our plans… The content that we’ll have will be great and we’ll talk about our future. We’ll talk more about what the Xbox brand means to us… We have millions of Xbox customers… we see them on a phone or another device… We want to make that possible.
While we do not know much about Xbox Anaconda it is speculated that the console will feature 8-cores and 16-threads based on the AMD Zen 2 architecture. It will also come with 1TB NVMe SSD and an AMD Navi-based GPU. It is expected that the Xbox Anaconda will come with 16GB GDDR6 memory and will be able to deliver 12 TFLOPs of performance. Xbox Anaconda is expected to cost $499 but this information has not been confirmed so take this with a grain of salt.
Furthermore, there is another console that Microsoft is working on another console called Lockhart. The console will come with 8-cores and 16-threads based on the AMD Zen 2 architecture along with 1TB NVMe SSD and 12GB GDDR6. This console is expected to deliver 4 TFLOPs. The console could be priced at around $249. Spencer also teased that he has been playing games on xCloud. He mentioned that he does not expect this to be adopted by the masses instantly but this could be popular in the upcoming years.
One thing I was doing on holiday was that I was playing games on xCloud… We want to make sure we get it as right as we can. We want to test it… to anyone else on the service, I’m just playing… It’ll be years before this is the primary way people are playing… but let’s think about our future… We should also have these five to ten year views on where things can go.
Let us know what you think about Xbox Anaconda and whether or not you are excited about what Microsoft is going to reveal at E3 2019.
