With Sony sitting this one out and Nintendo doing its usual direct, all eyes are on Microsoft for E3 2019. Aside from Bethesda and Ubisoft, this is the big one this year, where the company is expected to reveal a slew of new games alongside new hardware and more details on its streaming service, Project xCloud. It's an exciting moment: Don Mattrick's Xbox flubbed the launch of the last generation, but new Xbox chief Phil Spencer has spent the intervening time building out new services and repairing the company's relationship with the broader community. This will be Microsoft's chance to dive into the new console generation headfirst and, ideally, regain some of the ground it lost to Sony throughout the course of the Xbox One/PS4 generation.
Here's when and where to see what Redmond has in store:
When: Microsoft's press conference will be on Sunday, June 9, at 1:00 PM PT. Expect the conference to run for about an hour, maybe a little bit over.
Where: You can watch it on Microsoft's YouTube and Twitch channels, and we'll be posting the stream live as well.
What To Expect: From a software perspective Microsoft is headlining the show with Halo Infinite and Gears of War 5, but there's bound to be a ton of other stuff in there too. Expect to see Ring of Elding, a new collaboration between From Software and George R.R. Martin, as well as some of the other third-party titles the platform holders like to show off alongside their exclusives. Microsoft has been on a buying spree recently, so we might see a little bit of what the company has coming from some of its new studios, even if those games aren't likely to come out for a while.
Hardware-wise, we're expecting to hear more about at least one new console, and possibly two. That's the fairly well-confirmed rumor, at this point, that Microsoft is working on two new machines for the next generation: one entry-level device and one flagship device designed to go head to head with the PlayStation 5. What we don't know is how much we'll see. This could either be a brief confirmation of specs and a promise for more, which Sony recently did, or it could be a full-fledged reveal. Nobody expects these consoles to come out before 2020, so it would be a little early to show off a box.
And then there's Project xCloud, caught somewhere between hardware and software. This is Microsoft's answer to Google's recent Stadia announcement, and I'm a little more excited about this then I am about offerings from other major tech companies. Microsoft hits a sweet spot here: it has the kind of data infrastructure required to pull off a project on this scale but it's also well-established within the video game community, with the ability to merge its extant services and products into this new tech to provide a more seamless transition than what Google or Amazon might be able to manage.
