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Microsoft’s Xbox Series X won’t release this Thanksgiving

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For a moment, it seemed like Christmas was going to arrive a month early for gaming fans when Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Halo Infinite were announced for a Thanksgiving launch. It would have been an unprecedented move that potentially could have thrown Black Friday into chaos.

However, it appears the announcement was an error. Microsoft’s Xbox Series X website briefly claimed a Thanksgiving 2020 release date, but quickly changed back to Holiday 2020. Geoff Keighley, best known as host and organizer of The Game Awards, brought this to gamers’ attention.

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For now, it appears the release date remains unknown.

UPDATE: Sources tell me the Xbox Series X release date is unchanged and still "Holiday 2020." There is no announcement today about a release date.

— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) March 18, 2020

The Xbox Series X was first announced during E3 2019, and its final design was unveiled during The Game Awards in late 2019. It’s shaping up to be one of the most powerful game consoles ever created, with comparable specifications to the PlayStation 5 and the potential to surpass Sony’s GPU in terms of raw power.

Xbox Series X - World Premier - 4K trailer

The Xbox Series X began development in 2016 before the Xbox One X had launched. It was created with particular attention to developers’ and players’ feedback and aimed at pushing technical boundaries past expectations. It was also created to work seamlessly with the new Project xCloud streaming service, with certain games being cloud-native, meaning they will never rely solely on the console’s own hardware.

“It’s really about making sure players all across the world can have these same great gaming experiences,” Jason Ronald. partner director of program management for Xbox, said during Game Stack Live.

A feature called “stream awareness” allows games to recognize what device they are played on, allowing for more detailed user-interface details on an Xbox Series X compared to a mobile device. The console’s “dynamic latency input” also comes into play, with games recognizing actions coming from a controller versus a touchscreen and adjusting accordingly.

Xbox Series X will be backward-compatible with games on all previous Xbox consoles. Through its Smart Delivery program, players won’t have to buy some titles more than once to get the Series X version if they already purchased an Xbox One version. This includes Cyberpunk 2077, which will launch on Xbox One, PS4, Stadia, and PC just before the Xbox Series X arrives.

This is breaking news. This story will be updated as more information is available.

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Gabe Gurwin
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