Hot on the heels of Sony, Microsoft appears to be preparing an early, pre-E3 announcement of the next Xbox which we're tentatively referring to as the Xbox 720, barring any official name.
A Microsoft-affiliated ad agency Eventcore registered the domain XboxEvent.com earlier today. The detail was spotted by keen-eyed forum posters on NeoGAF, who put up screenshots of the registration. The same company was responsible for hosting Microsoft's E3 2012 presentation.
Further details about the domain can be found here.
As first reported by CVG, the domain registration suggests that their own presentation may be just around the corner. The publication got a quote out of a Sony official, who said that he believed the company had "caught Microsoft off-guard. We definitely ruffled some feathers."
Like the Sony conference, the details of the presentation are almost a total unknown. Beyond showing off its latest technology, we won't know what games they plan to showcase until we see it, although there's a good chance that if it's anything like what they've done in the past, it'll involve Halo 5 and the next Call of Duty—unless they plan to save those for E3 2013, in any case.
As we previously reported, Sony's next-generation console, the PlayStation 4, is slated for release by the end of this year. It goes without saying that neither Microsoft nor Sony will have an easy time with each other as their products go head to head in the next generation of the console wars.