Hey everyone! Welcome to our Xbox Keynote! First of all, we fully realize that we haven't been exactly at our best for, uh... 10 years...
But THIS YEAR... We are incredibly proud to announce a total revival of the Xbox brand! A complete overhaul of not only our recent consoles, but how we want to do business in the gaming space.
First off, you've told us that you want high-quality console exclusives. We know that you've made that VERY clear to us. And starting off, we are proud to announce that we are funding the Digsite team for our next Halo and have reached out to former Bungie veterans like Marty O' Donnell. We also want to announce and promise to our fans that we will ensure that 4-player splitscreen will be a full mandatory feature in all Halo games going forward. We're also planning to bring back many IPs that we know you fans have been asking for such as Freelancer and Banjo-Kazooie, and we will be funding games in those IPs once more.
We will also be introducing a new policy to every single one of the games that are published onto our digital store, and especially games that are published by us of course, that they will be fully playable and at least reasonably feature-complete on day 1 of their launch. We also no longer be working on or shipping microtransactions with any of our new games going forward and will heavily discourage third-party publishers from doing so.
But as excited as we are about all of that, we are just as excited to announce our new console and give details on what you should expect out of it when you take it home with you from the store. In the past, the Xbox brand used to be known for putting out the highest quality consoles using almost top-of-the-line components united with software to deliver an incredibly premium experience. We want to bring that back.
Starting with the controller, we knew that as good as our controller designs were for the 360 and the XOne and XSX consoles, stick drift has been an issue that has plagued these controller designs for a while. But no longer. Every first-party controller will now come with Hall-effect sticks that will never drift, almost 100% ensuring maximum precision, no matter the age of our first-party controllers.
Speaking of the controller, when we had released the Xbox 360, we made sure at that time that every console came bundled with a headset so that nobody on Xbox Live would feel left out of the conversation. It was a very good decision that allowed for very social game lobbies, so we have decided to once again bundle headsets with every console. No more boring silence during matches!
With that said, we also understand that some of our fans want a more safe space to chat in and some of our fans want a more free chatting environment, so we are introducing chat control preferences. Those who switch it to safe mode will only be able to hear others who have switched on safe mode and those on safe mode will come under more strict enforcement. With safe mode turned off, you can hear everyone and enforcement will be less strict. We've also integrated this into our console parental controls so parents have full control over the chatting preferences on any local account on the console.
We have decided to bring back swappable internal drives and also make them hot-swappable. The console also now can link to a Windows PC or a Linux PC (via Samba) and users can now freely transfer files to and from the console. There is also a redone media center on the Xbox that allows users to play music straight from a different PC via Samba with full playlist capabilities and full video-playback on demand.
And now... Our headline features...
Just to start, though we won't be utilizing it for modern games, we will be selling a model with a blu-ray drive for full optical backwards compatibility. Every game from the XSX down to the original Xbox will be fully playable on this console completely offline along with the usual full 4K UHD blu-ray playback capabilities. It should be noted though that for original Xbox and Xbox 360 gaming backwards compatibility, you must now have the physical disc for best results. We will sell digital copies of these games as much as we can as well, but due to licensing restrictions, we will not be able to provide every legacy game digitally.
Now it's time to address the elephant in the room. Physical ownership has been a subject of huge debate among gamers for a while now, and we heavily regret to say that we could have done much better in this space. Nevertheless though, certain realities must be faced first before we can proceed forward. We realize that the blu-ray standard is starting to become too old for modern gaming needs, and we feel that we could do even better in this space regardless. So, we will definitely not be letting go of physical media, but we will instead transition over to the next standard of physical games and gaming ownership. The XChip. Able to store anywhere from 20 GB to 500 GB with incredible load times without any install needed, this sd-card-looking device is the next step in physical ownership. But it doesn't just go faster and hold more. No. We at Xbox wanted to go even further. And so, on every single XChip, there is now a separate smaller empty data partition. This is for the user to control. With this empty parition on every XChip, you can save just about anything from save games to title updates to DLC packs. The XChip combines the power of digital distribution with full physical ownership of one's games and a return to pop-in-and-play gaming.
And with that, that should be everything! We hope you'll enjoy this console and can't wait for you to get your hands on it!
