The Xbox One X’s 4K capabilities means that games with much larger file sizes than the normal Xbox One, which means much more space being taken up on your hard drive.

The Xbox One X comes equipped with a 1TB hard drive. That may be double the size of the standard Xbox One’s hard drive, but when games like Forza Motorsport 7 will require a 100GB download on the Xbox One X, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for much else.

That’s why Microsoft and Xbox are looking for ways to alleviate the burden that comes with larger game files, and one of the methods they’re experimenting with is cloud storage, according to a recent interview with Xbox and Windows gaming VP Mike Ybarra.

“On the platform side [we’re] looking at things like what we call internally ‘Intelligent Delivery,'” Ybarra said.

What Intelligent Delivery would do is keep some of the assets for the game in the cloud and deliver them to your Xbox when needed, which will allow file sizes to be smaller, thus freeing up space on your hard drive.

While this cloud-based method of lightening the load sounds good in concept, it could provide issues for people with slower internet speeds, as their consoles would have to constantly be streaming assets in order to benefit. Of course, the alternative would be to simply download the entire file and run it straight from your hard drive, so it’s not like Xbox One X owners with slower bandwidth would be completely out of luck were Xbox to adopt this feature.

Don’t expect Intelligent Delivery (or whatever Xbox ends up calling it) to launch with the Xbox One X, as it sounds like an idea that Microsoft is simply toying with at this point. It seems like Ybarra and the rest of the crew are expecting people to upgrade their new consoles throughout its lifetime anyway, much like you’d do with a gaming PC, so Microsoft might also lean heavily on that as a way to supplement sales for its newest console, giving them less incentive to work with the cloud.

Posted: Aug 24, 2017 5:14 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: http://www.egmnow.com/all/microsoft-might-have-a-clever-solution-to-xbox-one-xs-biggest-problem/