Rumor: Next Xbox coming E3 2012

We didn’t see it materialize last week as some had hoped.

Now, some are already willing to claim the successor Microsoft’s six-year-old Xbox 360 will be revealed at next year’s E3 trade show.

E3, the world’s largest organized video game event for industry professionals, just wrapped up last Thursday. The show was more noteworthy than in recent years because new hardware was the focus of attention – Nintendo’s Wii U and Sony’s Playstation Vita.

This, after years of no new hardware announcements since 2005. Because the new console generation is poised to last much longer than the traditional experience, E3 had started to seem flat.

The Wii U and PS Vita pumped a lot of much needed energy into the show, but that left Microsoft as the lone company without a new gadget to show off.

Videogamer.com reports that the company is already focusing on changing that next year, claiming it has heard from an inside source that developer Crytek is working on a new entry in its TimeSplitters game franchise for the new version of the Xbox.

It’s also suggested that E3 2012, which is about 355 days away, will be the launching pad for this game as well as the console itself.

What the new console will be called is anyone’s guess, though the fan favorite seems to be ‘Xbox 720.’ Other possibilities remain from speculation before the Xbox 360 name was finalized, like the ‘NextBox.’