Xbox One out before Playstation

Microsoft has set up a pre-Christmas console war with Sony after announcing its new Xbox One will go on sale a week before the PlayStation 4.

The console, Microsoft’s first since the Xbox 360 eight years ago, will hit the high street in the Republic of Ireland and 12 other countries on November 22, the company said.

It comes two weeks after Sony announced the fourth generation PlayStation would go on sale in the Republic of Ireland on November 29, with an earlier November 15 launch in the US.

Yusuf Mehdi, Xbox’s corporate vice president of marketing, strategy and business, said US pre-orders of the new console had outstripped anything before it.

“The culmination of many years of listening to you, our fans, developing innovative technology and partnering with the best game and entertainment partners in the industry has brought us to this point,” he said.

“There is still a lot more work to do, but the teams are making excellent progress and are focused on launch.”

Mr Mehdi said the new platform would feature exclusive games like the latest Halo, Dead Rising 3, Ryse: Son of Rome and Forza Motorsport 5.

There will also be new digital content from Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 4 and FIFA 14 Ultimate Team.

He said the platform had had its CPU power increased by around 10%, from 1.6GHZ to 1.75GHZ, to give added scope to game developers.

The console will also go on sale in November in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, the UK and the US, with others to follow in 2014.

The console was unveiled in May at Microsoft’s US headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

The sleek black console, with a new Kinect camera sensor and game pad, is the successor to the hugely successful Xbox 360 which sold a reported 77 million consoles around the world.

The new machine sees Microsoft add a Blu-ray drive to its console and the use of video calling service Skype.

The upgraded Kinect camera allows the device to better analyse body movements and can even read a user’s heartbeat when exercising, Microsoft said at the time.