Xbox says a fifth console generation is on the way as it marks 25 years

Xbox marked 25 years on November 12 with a note to employees signed Asha. The note says the company has built four generations of consoles, with a fifth on the way. It says Xbox games now reach more than a billion players a year. The note does not name the next console or give a date.

The note says that machine was two to three times larger than rival consoles, shipped with a hard drive and an Ethernet jack, and had more than twice the processing power of the PlayStation and GameCube. Halo: Combat Evolved was the launch title. A year later, Xbox Live added persistent friend lists and matchmaking.

The note says Xbox has built four generations of consoles, with a fifth on the way.

It names Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Diablo, Doom, Fable, Fallout, Forza, Gears of War, Halo, Minecraft, Overwatch, Sea of Thieves, The Elder Scrolls, StarCraft, Warcraft, and Wolfenstein. It also says id Software joined Xbox about 24 years after the Windows era it describes.

It says 111 people who have been at Xbox or its studios for 25 years or more will each receive an engraved console.

The note says 111 people who have been at Xbox or its studios for 25 years or more will each receive an engraved console. It says the company is bringing the anniversary celebration to Seattle today, after events with fans elsewhere.

The note says that 1982 game had 2D graphics, 16 colors, and 20 airports. It says the 2024 version draws on more than 2.5 petabytes of data, which it calls more than 15 billion times the size of the original, and a 200-million-square-mile map. The note says the cost of modern games has grown with that scale, and that a small team will be able to build worlds that now take hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars. It does not say when that shift arrives.