We might be slowly barreling our way towards a brand-new console generation, complete with game streaming, a PS5 and one or two new Xboxes, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more hardware here in this generation. We’ve heard rumblings–though nothing official–that Microsoft is planning on releasing a digital-only Xbox One with no disc drive and a lower price point to match. And now we’ve got some further confirmation. German retailer WinFuture.De appears to have inadvertently Tweeted out an ad for the upcoming console that was scooped up by Wario64. Let’s take a look:
Xbox One S “All Digital’ console leaked, €229.99, 1TB for May 7th in Europe (no-disc drive) https://t.co/WAAI7k0Xll pic.twitter.com/178He93wSY
— Wario64 (@Wario64) April 13, 2019
It looks exactly like you might imagine an Xbox One with no disc drive would look like, which isn’t that surprising. This looks like it’s going to be very clearly located within the Xbox One family, and Microsoft wouldn’t want to confuse the market with a more extreme redesign just before it announces the new Scarlett hardware. It looks like it will come with a 1 TB hard drive and pre-installed with Sea of Thieves, Minecraft and Forza Horizon 3, covering a pretty broad base of demographics. This one costs €229.99, though other regions might get different bundles. I’m assuming that we’ll see some sort of bundle with Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold, too: this machine is more or less designed to sell those, after all.
Microsoft has been building towards a discless console this whole generation: at first, it was doing so pretty hamfistedly, and then much more carefully and successfully once Phil Spencer took over. And right now, the company is well-situated to sell a machine like this: all a customer needs is a subscription to Game Pass and it instantly turns into a full-fledged
I do not believe that this is the last discless console we’re going to see from Xbox. Widespread rumors suggest the company will be making two new Xboxes for the next generation: a more powerful successor to the Xbox One X and a smaller machine built with Game Pass and streaming in mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if what we’re seeing with this new machine is a kind of preview of that second, cheaper machine.
