Microsoft's Project Scorpio console will also debut in China this year

This week Microsoft confirmed that its next Xbox console, which is still publicly branded "Project Scorpio" and expected to debut later this year, will also launch in China before the end of 2017.

Notably, this will be the first time Microsoft is launching an Xbox One in China within the same year that it launches in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere.

While the company did officially launch the original Xbox One in China a few years ago, it was almost a year after the console's debut in late 2013, when China was only just beginning to make a show of relaxing its official 13-year ban on foreign game consoles.

The Project Scorpio console is expected to be significantly more powerful than the extant Xbox One, and you can read a detailed breakdown of its technical specs (as well as those of its even beefier dev kits) in our in-depth rundown of the Project Scorpio dev kit.