Microsoft: There will be no more generations of game consoles in the future

There will be no new generations of game consoles in the future, only hardware upgrades where all games will remain compatible. That says a CEO of Microsoft in an interview.

That strategy has its origins in the smartphone market, where products are updated every year. Until recently, consoles received a new generation around every seven years, with new games that are not playable on previous generation consoles.

That’s over, says Aaron Greenberg of Microsoft’s Xbox division in an interview with Engadget. “We think the future is without generations of consoles. We think about the ability to build a collection, build a community, and make iterations of hardware. We’re going big on that with Project Scorpio.” Project Scorpio is the console Microsoft plans to release at the end of 2017, just over a year after the Xbox One S, which comes out this summer. According to Greenberg, Microsoft thinks of its consoles as a “family of devices.” “What we’re really saying is ‘this isn’t a new generation, everything you’ve got moves forward and keeps working’.”

Microsoft is not the first to express this sentiment. A game developer claimed this spring that Sony thinks the same behind closed doors. How Nintendo thinks about this topic is unknown.