Xbox One Launch Date Announced – Among Other Things

Well, it’s finally here.  Yusuf Mehdi, Vice President of Marketing, Strategy and Business has made several announcements on his blog about the upcoming Xbox One.  Included in the announcement were details on:

• Status on production of the Xbox One console
• The availability of Xbox One consoles for pre-order
• Technical enhancements that will provide an increase in CPU performance
• And finally… the Xbox One will be released to 13 Markets including Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, UK and USA with more releases planned for 2014.

“We are humbled and gratified by the tremendous interest in Xbox One from game fans everywhere.” said Mehdi, “We sold out of our pre-order supply faster than at any other time in our history and we are on path to have the biggest launch of an Xbox ever.  We look forward to celebrating with millions and millions of gamers this holiday.”

Because of the demand for the Xbox One console and the production is well on track, more Day One editions have been made available for pre-order.  If you missed out on the first batch of pre-orders, you can make one here.

Along with this information about the release date, Mehdi went on to talk about the CPU.  It has been increased from 1.6GHZ to 1.75GHZ, a 10 percent increase in CPU power.  That’s on top of the six percent GPU increase announced earlier.  All this extra power means that developers will have more tools to work with on creation of games as well as the increased performance of games and entertainment on the console.

Some of the games being released to the console include Xbox One exclusives like Halo, Dead Rising 3, Ryse:  Son of Rome and Forza Motorsport 5 as well as digital content for titles such as Call of Duty:  Ghosts and Battlefield 4 which will make it to the Xbox One first; and let’s not forget FIFA 14 Ultimate Team Experience which won’t be available anywhere else.

The launch date of November 22 is a meaningful one for the Xbox because that is the date that the Xbox 360 was originally released in 2005.  Are you ready to say “Xbox On” and open up a whole new world of entertainment for your living room?