New Xbox console leaked… oh wait

They should call it the XBOX 719 just to annoy folk

We’re not really keen on jumping all over a story unless we find that it has an element of truth in it, so when we got an email from one of our writers at 6pm last night with a link to the Develop website’s revelation that EA have apparently had a prototype of the next Xbox on their desk for a month, we were naturally sceptical. A quick browse around the ‘net showed that nobody else, that we could see, was talking about it and it’d be unlikely that this sort of news would come and go without Twitter exploding in a frenzy of “bullshit” or “yay” comments. According to the Develop article, the console was merely the components fully working inside a standard PC case, citing…

“Quite often when new consoles come around they’re packaged into a PC shell, but actually what’s inside is an entirely new console,” a senior, trusted, well-placed source said.

Rumour has it that this new Xbox would be slated for release in the fourth quarter of 2012, which is something that Microsoft and Sony have previously said would not be happening as the next generation was at least another two years away with a possible 2014 drop. With both Microsoft and EA refusing to comment last night, and nothing else coming to the fore in the meantime, we watched closely for any further developments. Today, we have this…

“This story is a total fabrication – 100 percent not true,” commented EA corporate spokesman Jeff Brown.

While this is undoubtedly a relief to those of us who can’t bear the thought of shelling out for yet another piece of hardware , with so many having been released in this current generation, there are those who will obviously be disappointed that we’re not looking forward to an announcement at E3 of a new generation with, presumably, more powerful processing and graphics capabilities.  Speculation has, as one would expect, arisen as to whether the initial “leak” was orchestrated to test public opinion on whether now is a good time to move on to another generation or whether the news was nothing but fabrication, denying that there’s any need to move forward. There will always be arguments on both sides as to which path is better for the video game industry in general but as long as the graphics lovers have the PC to rely on then the consoles can continue to lead the “quick fix” option of being able to boot up and just play without any hassle. Apart from having to install to PS3 HDD, of course.

One of the many concepts being bandied about for the next Xbox design

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