Will we see mid-generation console refreshes again? | This Week in Business

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.

Here's a fun fact. The Xbox One had been on shelves for barely two and a half years when Microsoft announced its mid-cycle refresh, the Xbox One X, at E3 2016 under the name "Project Scorpio."

The Xbox Series X|S has now been on shelves for almost two and a half years, so maybe it's about time to start wondering when we're going to see an Xbox Series Z, or whatever unhinged naming convention Microsoft's marketing team is cooking up. Then again, perhaps not.

Yup, it's one of those columns.

To save a bunch of time, the answer to the headline question here is "I don't know," and I will be burning through a lot of words weighing the merits of a few different answers to the question before ultimately shrugging my shoulders and resorting to an utterly weak sauce "Time will tell" conclusion.

If that's not your bag, by all means skip to the quotes-and-stats recap part of the column or just close the browser tab entirely. I won't take it personally.

Before we break down some of the possible answers below, we should specify what we mean here by a mid-cycle refresh. For the purposes of this column, we're not talking about a simple console redesign or something with a larger hard drive. We're talking about a significant boost to the specs that will be marketed as the main reason to buy one. We mean the PS4 Pro, not the PS4 Slim, the Xbox One X, not the Xbox One S.

With that out of the way, let's look at the scenarios for whether we're going to see another mid-cycle refresh.

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