June has long been a big month for gamers. Before COVID-19 basically killed it, it was mainly because of E3, the Electronics Entertainment Expo, where all the games coming up for the next year or so would be on display. Now that E3 is shut down, and likely for good, individual companies are taking advantage of the long-remembered date to put together their own shows. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) will be coming up in early June, and shares of the tech giant gained fractionally going into the closing minutes of Tuesday’s trading.
The first major advance for Xbox will be connected to Microsoft’s larger AI aspirations. AI will be coming to “Minecraft,” as well as other Xbox and PC games, that will allow games to not only check your inventory, but also provide tips and guides based on any problems the game can spot.
Using “Minecraft” as an example, players might want to make a wooden shovel. The game will use AI to check a player’s inventory, and, upon discovering that the player has no wood, will then tell the player to go punch some trees because that is how you get wood in “Minecraft.”
It’s still in its earliest days, of course—and one has to wonder how much storage will be demanded on the already tight spaces involved with the Xbox Series X and Series S to run AI functions—but it could be an interesting twist all the same.
New Xbox Sooner than We Think?
Meanwhile, in a rumor worthy of a “pre-E3 leak,” reports suggest that we might be seeing a new Xbox sooner rather than later. Earlier reports suggested that the next generation of Xbox could be coming out in 2028. Now, reports suggest that Microsoft is eager to get a jump on Sony (NYSE:SONY) and its PlayStation 6 by beating the Sony system to market.
This was, after all, how Microsoft managed to get an edge on Sony back when the Xbox 360 came out; it beat Sony to the market and took the first-mover advantage accordingly. Now, Microsoft is looking to roll out a new Xbox—not just a slight hardware refresh, either—by 2026, which seems unlikely. But stranger things have happened.
Is Microsoft Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on MSFT stock based on 32 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 34.65% rally in its share price over the past year, the average MSFT price target of $491.56 per share implies 14.56% upside potential.
