The gaming industry has grown and changed a lot in the past couple of decades, taking something many thought was for children into a full-blown world with vast opportunities, massive games, and life-defining experiences. Gaming, whether it’s on PC, Switch, PlayStation, or Xbox nowadays, is a huge part of life.
Of course, that growth would have been impossible without the hardware and software developers who have poured their soul into gaming over the past few decades. Every machine out there has its strengths and ways it defined its generation, and a recent trailer showcased theoretically, outrageously, and sometimes hilariously—what Xbox could look like in the next 20 years. NOTE: As highlighted by Xbox, this is a marketing and ad campaign inspired by Battlefield 2042 and this is not a real product. By the time 2042 actually rolls around though, who knows.
The Xbox 2042, as imagined, features quantum computing, the world’s first holographic UX, 1 exaFLOPS of processing power, native 32K video in full-spectrum color, and 240 FPS (up to 480 FPS) with zero latency. Despite these huge numbers, the trailer imagines the Xbox 2042 as a “gaming supercomputer you can hold in the palm of your hands.” There’s no such thing as loading times whatsoever, all games are instant-on, and cloud-based open-world games are so enormous they have their own data centers.
To showcase the “power” of the Xbox 2042, there are scenes of “imagined gameplay” which are just things happening in real life. Indeed, the “aim” of the Xbox 2042 is to ensure that real-life and video game graphics are practically indistinguishable. The holographic UX is shown to be wild in comparison to modern UXs, and at launch, the Xbox 2042 will feature 70 launch titles, as well as have a library of 5000+ Xbox games from every generation released since 2001.
Again, all of this is incredibly wishful thinking for Xbox in the next 20 years. None of it is real, but the fact remains that gaming 20 years from now will likely look nothing like it does right now. With as impressive as the PS5 and Xbox Series X are, that’s saying something. And that’s only the future of Xbox, as not only will competitors Sony and Nintendo make their own strides, but so will games and how games are played—VR spaces, the possibilities of single-player narratives, and the growth rate of live-service games.
It may be all fiction and it may all be just to support Battlefield 2042’s approaching release date, but the future of Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and more is definitely something fun to imagine.