Gadgetory

over the past few days there's been some arising rumors that Microsoft might be working on a fourth model Xbox one to come out sometime next year something that would be kind of a super-slim model where it's cheaper and smaller than currently available Xbox ones and the way that Microsoft would achieve this is with a very interesting and very important single decision dropping the disk drive ultimate in radical technology turbo graphic CD it uses the immense memory of CD soft super intense gameplay now there are a lot of reasons why they might want to drop disk drive and honestly I think they're good ones we'll get into that a little bit but first let's talk about the immediate impact of doing something like that by removing the disk drive from the Xbox you end up making a lot of free space inside of the system and thus you can make it a lot more cheap because you're able to use larger parts or other things you can rearrange it a little bit on the inside and overall make a much more affordable system and if these rumors are true the idea is to make a system that is on par with the Xbox 1s in terms of power but at a price point below $200 as for what something like this would look like I think Microsoft is currently on the trend of really wanting to focus on making all their systems very aesthetically similar you can already see that with the 1s and One X where yes there are some differences where they place vents and you know some very specific shapes but the general design idea where you have this main rectangular block piece with the stand I think they're gonna keep that now by removing the disk drive and depending on what they do with other parts they could heavily change the shape of the system it could just be something that's thinner or it could potentially even move to being closer like a square shape as opposed to the rectangular we're currently seeing like I said earlier this is an interesting and I think good idea for a few different reasons and keep in mind this is coming from someone who traditionally loves physical media I have held on as long as I can still buy physical copies of my games because yeah I'm a little vain I like having a collection that I can look at but at the same time there's getting to be fewer and fewer good reasons to really justify them still being a thing aside from common arguments like Oh digital is just so much more convenient and then obviously the fact that we talked about earlier where it's safe through min the system there's just a lot of reasons why discs don't make a ton of sense anymore to use on a major console first off it's just outdated technology first remove the disk from the case push open on your CDI player well you may use the controller to open the disk door you know most games now when you buy them even physically you're installing most of the game on your hard drive because the time it takes to read a disk is just too slow to be functional and we're even getting the point where our games are getting so large some games still need to disks even though we have such larger capacities now for instance Red Dead Redemption 2 just launched with an install disk and a play disk that's crazy not to mention the fact that producing something like this in large quantities creates a lot of waste when versus compared to just buying something digitally where you just download to your system and you're done that's really simple now there are some counter arguments to why you might not want this but honestly a lot of them aren't really is true as they used to be for instance yes going all digital does mean you're gonna use up more harddrive space going physical but that doesn't mean much anymore because like I said most games have you install the vast majority of their data now some don't some games don't rely on as much like say fighting games but anything that's open-world you basically install the whole thing and you're gonna use that space either way now there's also the fear that well if you go all digital some games might at one point just cease to exist and there's no way to get them which is a rightful fear I mean we're already seeing that happen with some games like the PT demo that you can't download anymore even if you got it once before but the issue there is that games are not relying so much on day one patches or DLC or balance fixes that even if you still owned a physical copy of a game it might not really be usable in the far future if you can't download all those fixes and such it's not going to run the way that's really meant to there's always going to be that part of me that wants the nostalgia and loves the idea of owning physical games and all the old cartridges and stuff I have and you know I'm still gonna get some of those but it just doesn't really make sense anymore and I think it's kind of going the same way that a lot of other digital media is where you know you can still have those limited physical releases there can be those physical options for people that really want to collect that but it can't be the default option for everyone anymore as of right now Microsoft has not commented at all all these rumors so we have no indication of whether or not this is at all real and usually I'm very very skeptical of rumors but I kind of lean towards this one being real and if it's not it's something that could very easily see Microsoft for really doing and this ladies into something that I think has really bitten Microsoft's kind of hidden strategy over the last couple years which is to try out a couple of different slightly crazy ideas and seeing how the market reacts to it and whether or not it would work for a potential new system whatever you want to call it the Xbox too but the point is you're seeing all these different ideas like Xbox game paths where you're not only being able to play all these games for monthly fee but you're getting access to brand-new games right away on launch day like for its horizon for you're seeing again with the idea where they tested the market for people buying Xboxes and paying for it monthly versus having actually just buy a system straight up at the full price and if this rumor is true we're seeing another test with the idea of a system that doesn't have a disk drive it all plays into this concept of a new Xbox that focuses more on digital and streamable games instead of the traditional way consoles are perceived