14 DAY TRIAL // The team at Microsoft in charge of the Xbox One home console announces that it plans to add support for external storage for the next-gen console soon, although the company is not yet ready to offer an official date for it.
Larry Hryb aka Major Nelson, the leading community liaison for the new device, writes on Reddit that, “External game storage is coming soon. I need to check on media support.”
He adds, “Lots of good work going on to make the console even better – some you’ll see soon, some will show up later. But: it is all good stuff.”
Microsoft has promised that it will deliver local voice support for the Xbox One as soon as possible but, once more, no actual timeline has been included in the announcement.
The new device needs external storage options because the internal hard drive of the platform is not big enough to cope with the huge number of titles that are being released via digital downloads.
It’s unclear at the moment whether Microsoft plans to allow each user of the Xbox One to use his preferred hard drive and connect it to the console or the company will sell a special external storage device, which will probably be significantly more expensive and will come just in a limited number of standard sizes.
The company has already delivered two major firmware updates for the next-gen console and an April preview is already in the hands of a small number of users and being tested internally.
All users of the Xbox One are encouraged to offer as much feedback as possible on its core features in order for Microsoft to see exactly what the community would like to find in the coming firmware updates.
Rumors are also suggesting that a new version of the platform is being created at the moment, without the Kinect motion tracking system and incorporating some other minor hardware changes, and that it will be launched for a lower price at some point in the fall.
This is one of the moves that Microsoft hopes will increase the sales pace of the Xbox One, which has been so far lagging behind the rival PlayStation 4 from Sony.
It will be interesting to see how the new Xbox performs in the NPD Group numbers for March, which will be revealed in about 10 days.
Microsoft has said that the launch of Titanfall has boosted its sales, but has not offered hard numbers.