2020: the future of gaming and entertainment is already happening.
As the CoVid-19 worldwide pandemic was a catalyst to Nintendo’s most recent success, the rivalry between XBox and PlayStation is heating up and it will likely play out throughout the summer and fall while hype and stakes are on the rise.
While the Covid-19 worldwide crisis kept the world on lockdown, Nintendo which launched the Nintendo Switch Lite back in September 2019, saw its business soar also thanks to the soothing power of its 3+ game Animal Crossing.
Now that it’s official that both the new XBox Series X and PlayStation 5 will be launched likely just in time to get into your Christmas shopping list, it looks like we’re heading straight into a gaming console turf war.
In an XBox Wire Update, Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management for Xbox Series X gave out some details highlighting how in addition to overall significant advancements in terms of both power and speed, there’s been a particular investment to improve and expand backwards compatibility.
According to Ronald, the new XSX is taking compatibility up a notch and improving the playing experience of past generation games. Not only gamers will be able to play loads of past games — over 500 games from Xbox 360 to Xbox One — these will run natively on the Xbox Series X hardware better than ever before.
Meanwhile Sony announced a Playstation 5 reveal on June 4th.
Earlier this year in January, at the CES press conference the tech and media giant announced that the PlayStation 5 would be arriving this 2020 holiday season.
Unlike the XSX, the creators of PS5 haven’t been crystal clear about PS4 games backwards compatibility as initial reports seemed to imply the console would be compatible with only about 100 PS4 games which generated some confusion (see: panic) among fans.
Sony assured its PS teams already tested “hundreds of titles” and will be testing “thousands more as we move toward launch” so in short, almost all PS4 games should work on PS5 from day one.
As the respectively Sony and Microsoft companies are tailing each other in releasing both news of the launch and that of the unveiling, it’s likely that even though ESA canceled E3 due to Coronavirus concerns, we’ll still be able to witness this game of wits (and marketing) play out thoroughly in the other gaming conferences and events scheduled in the months to come.
