Next-gen Xbox details leaked, from someone who claims to have one

Kinect mandatory?

I can already see the headlines: "NEWSFLASH! Hackers jack into Joe Smoe's kinect camera and watches him as he sits on his couch!"

Well not necessarily, did you watch the PS3 adverts and listen to why Sony chose having multiple cores? they used the example of one core could be dedicated to processing rain effects and another for water physics when the drops hit a puddle, as an example, then another could be dedicated to lighting etc...

I guess that's the theory but the ps3 didn't really show much extra graphical omph over the Xbox 360 so it may of just been a load of rubbish to be fair.

I kinda have a problem with Burtys comment, as M$'s Xbox 360, is way inferior, although people seem to have come up with a few fancy things for the kinect, which I see people here bashing so... But alas its the fact you think the 360 stands high above the ps3 that it gives me a hard time believing Sony can retain the crown.

To explain my logic. The Xbox came out and it was cheaper... or so everyone said. The PS3 was too pricey, and everyone ran away from it crying. No one compared the bang for your buck, and how out of pocket you would be buying an Xbox 360. To make it even compare to the PS3 you had to buy, the console, the HD-DVD player, either 7 years supply of batteries, or rechargeable battery packs, and 7 consoles. Total cost £1700, to Sonys £400. I may embellish a little there, but I have read of people who due to the RROD purchase 7 machines. And I can only think of, a fool and his money, and stupid is doing the same thing and expecting different results.

And the reason for the RROD was the X clamp, a clamp that did nothing, did not need to be there, and yet although M$ knew this left it in and didnt remove from refurbished models. Nubs.

I also read ( and sure maybe I read some BS by a fanboi online journalist ) on how the Xbox being the lowest common denominator = bad ports of games. Like many people here who only believe in PC gaming and how consoles are the reason for programmers being lazy, and making the games for the weakest link of the bunch *points at Xbox360* so that every platform is covered with the one tacky version of sorts.

Yet, everyone does believe Sony failed, for some reason, everyone plays Xbox. I have both, I play Halo, would rather see it on PC, specially as my xbox in its 3 years or so has seen 30 hrs of play total. I don't understand how a console with such a fail rate, which is the reason for such pants game ports elsewhere, is preferred by so many. The only thing going for Sony would be the Blu ray player on the Xbox. One of the very reasons articles claimed for poor ports on PS3 was the lack of interest in developers writing for the bluray format.

So while I have no problem believe that Sony can always walk over M$ as they rarely get anything right ( XP, Win7, and not much else ) I have to say I don't believe in the human race. Too many people who know not what they pay for, they pay and play, and hope it's ok to follow the herd down that path blindly.

Ok... think of it from another angle. What does MS gain compared to what do they risk if they were ever caught being ABLE to spy on people. Google almost got their pants sued off because they were recording Wi-Fi locations. Apple almost got sued because they were recording your locations in a file on the iPhone, and those were WITHOUT personal data. Now imagine if MS had video archives of people in their homes. It doesn't matter why they say they're recording people.. or viewing, or whatever. Every civil rights lawyer in the country would be jumping all over it. I can't even think of a legal case (or even conspiracy theory) that comes close the level of outrage that would result of the Kinect recording people.

The reality is, MS is probably going through great lengths to make sure the Kinect CAN'T be accessed remotely. And it's not to make you feel better about whether MS is spying on you. It's to stop common hackers and/or thieves from getting a view of the inside of your home. If you really think this system could be used for spying, at least understand that Big Brother won't be using it... it'll be a hacker who knows when you're not home so he can break in. And that's why MS will do their best to make it secure.

Ok, I wasn't saying the Xbox was any better than the PS3, I just mean if you look at games made specifically for that system, say Halo 4 vs Killzone 2/3, the graphics aren't necessarily better on either, I'm not an Xbox fan boy, in fact I hate the Xbox more than the PS3, I was just stating that this time round, the Xbox did beat the PS3 in sales figures, I've been to quite a few gaming conventions as well, I try to go to PC specific ones but even places like Eurogamer the Xbox was used on a lot of the stands.

Also, the Xbox was not the lowest denominator, it was the Wii, which sold more than the Xbox and PS3.

@Mike
Like I said previously. Its about appearances. It LOOKS like MS wants the Kinetic hooked up at all times for something shady. As for any trouble they would get into, I simply point to ANY ToS page that we as a consumer have to agree to. They could bury somewhere deep in their ToS that MS is allowed to view you while you are gaming. Most ppl blindly accept a ToS simply because a ToS is normally filled with so much legalese that the average persons brain just clouds over.
My concern is still mainly the backwards compatibility. I can get over the Kinetic being plugged in at all times. I would just turn it around and if MS wanted to watch all they would see is the bottom of a TV. I have spent MY money for MY games. Roughly $60 per game. I dont relish the fact that I will have to put those games away or keep both a 360 AND a 720 out. Im thinking that the console makers have forgotten the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. As the consumer, we have the gold. If MS and possibly Sony follow through with their plans to cut out used games, well they wont be getting my gold.

The Xbox also had a 1 year lead on the PS3 if you look at sales figures the PS3 has been catching up. Also the xbox for the first 3 years had like almost a 40 to 50 % RROD rate which is ridiculous how much has the RROD cost Microsoft? I think that games designed for PS3 look better than ones designed for Xbox 360 but compared to computers they look like complete crap.

What do you mean by not necessarily better? Both titles are exclusives with different developers and game engines.

Ok, saying MT is useless on a console is going too far, but I don't see them doing much more with multi-threading on next gen consoles than what they are doing on current gen systems. I don't see them challenging the PC for example.

What cores thing? Do you mean multi-core, because we have that in consoles already. 3 in the XBOX, 7+1 in the PS3.

I think the development SDK will also have more RAM than the retail so if you have 8GB in the dev console expect 4GB or less in the retail system.

And lets be honest here, I was kinda right about the systems being not that much different this time around, the Wii U, 720 and PS4 will all have similar looking games, like PS3 and 360, and before anyone says yeah but the Wii U GPU is not as powerful well the PS3 GPU sucks compared to the 360's and look at the difference in games, hardly any.

But to be honest if it does feature those security features I'll be buying new gaming PC parts over the 720 any day and just get all my games on STEAM.

Hmm. Aside from the processors as I'm not really able to figure out what comparable PC specs are to that, my off-the-shelf PC right now meets or exceeds those specs in every respect except for GPU. I'm no expert on pricing, I'm sure I could fish up decent deals but if I'm looking at this right, my current PC is a $250 investment away from exceeding next-gen console performance specs if even I wanted to take that easy way out and save $100-200 by not buying the console, as opposed to building a real power-tower from the ground up.

Interesting. My desire to build a PC instead of getting a console is, for all intents and purposes, officially confirmed with this revelation, assuming it's accurate. I'm pretty much set on taking what little next-gen seed money I curently have and put it toward a new tower instead. This pretty much seals it.

This is a false analogy. A console is built for a single purpose, targeting a single framerate, at perhaps 3 resolutions - 4 if we include the forthcoming 4k "UltraHD" resolution. And do it all in a virtually silent chassis that will fit in your entertainment center.

Even the processor mentioned is unique, as AMD doesn't offer any CPUs with 32MB of on-die ESRAM cache. (See here: http://cloudfront2.bostinno.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Xbox720.jpg) Even though the clock-speed is low, this CPU will perform very, very well due to the on-die ESRAM cache.

The arguments about the 360 and PS3 are comical, especially when xbox kiddies start spitting sales numbers. The first 360 was a disaster, I personally know of 20 people, no exaggeration, who experienced RROD. If you truthfully discard people that bought another 360 or a new 360S because of issues the PS3 has sold more units in the USA, and easily worldwide.
As far as the paranoia with the Kinect I might be taking it to seriously, I just hate it when a company forces or tries to force something even if it is vital to the 720's gaming experience.

I don't know why people complained about Xbox 360 controller not support for the next generation Xbox. Duh, I care less about the incompatibility. Original Xbox controller not support for Xbox 360 so what!!???? If I don't want Kinect to watch me everytime I play (Sometime I play naked lol) I can just simply turn the kinect around....oh wait an error message popup telling me kinect can't see individual player or players, so...

No love for old controllers? I hope they won't get any love when they are old!

Let's just call it "LitterBox" and be done with it....

Nah, personally I prefer to call it the eXcrement Box... got quite a few people I know calling it that already. lol

Regarding the Kinect 'spying' capability.

Everyone who has commented on this has missed the point by a wide mile.

It's not about looking at a video feed of you. No one gives a damn about that - porn is everywhere in the web. It's about the data. Android phones, Chrome, Firefox, a TON of software you install today on your Windows machine prompts you by default to enable 'anonymous usage statistics' to send back to the company.THIS is what will be a problem with the new Xbox.

I'm sure if you look at the ToS of the current Kinect games, it'll say that some data may be sent back to the company. If you're not really following me here and you don't know what kind of 'data' might be useful since they won't be spying at your naked butt, here we go:

- Kinect recognises limbs and joints (pivots) by default in 'gaming mode'. It's actually in the news article.
- MS can gather a ton of info about this.
- The dimensions of users will be able to measure global and country-specific human sizing averages. This is useful to car manufacturers, furniture, clothing, etc.
- Measuring the range of movement of human targets. Gather this data and compare it over a 5 year period.
- Kinect is capable of detecting objects as well as humans. E.g. skateboards can be scanned into a game and used as a controller. Expand this, and MS can actually determine what is in your living from.
- From the above, they can use additional photo evidence to find out roughly how much $$ is in your living room. Extrapolate to find the household 'wealthyness' value.
- Using the wealthyness factor, MS store will display cheaper or more expensive games.

Shall I go on?