RUMOR: There might be TWO Next-Gen Xbox Consoles

At E3 this year, Microsoft made the unsurprising surprise announcement that they were hard at work on the next generation of Xbox consoles.That was to be expected, I would think everyone sans Nintendo is thinking about what will be the ninth generation of gaming hardware, but the fact that Microsoft was even willing to bring it up has people wondering if maybe they’re closer to revealing a final product than their competition at Sony.

Nobody but Microsoft insiders know for sure, but a tech site called Thurrott claims to have some insight into what the next-gen Xbox console will look like. And while the website doesn’t cite any sources, the picture it paints is actually quite believable: specifically, that Microsoft will be releasing not one but two consoles.

Specifically, they’ll have a lightweight and cheap “streaming” console that works much like the Xbox One was supposed to, with an always-online component that requires you have a really good, stable internet connection. However, its main purpose is to project an image and receive controller inputs; the rest of the heavy lifting is done long distance by Microsoft and its infamous Azure servers. This would allow the console to be considerably less expensive than a normal console.

Speaking of, if you don’t have the world’s best internet, Microsoft will be offering a second, more traditional console that does all of the processing and memory storage and the like locally. Obviously, we don’t have any idea just what the specs are, but you can imagine it’ll be at least nominally better than the Xbox One Scorpio.

Obviously, we have no way of knowing if any of this has a grounding in reality, but it makes perfect sense to me. Microsoft is more invested than Sony in the inevitable pure-streaming future, but to avoid the backlash they suffered from the Xbox One, it makes sense to give people these kinds of options.

Regardless, we’ll have quite a wait before we find out if any of these rumors hold merit.