vaibhavpisal
Member
Any game downloadable on system should run out of the box using controller.
Thats what I expect from a console.
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Jez Corden: “There is no devkit for the next Xbox right now, the whole idea of the next Xbox is that it’s a PC but in a TV friendly shell”, 2027
Thats what I expect from a console.
memoryman3
Neo Member
And how will Microsoft successfully mandate this if the system can install any PC game? Developers could just ignore it and you would have to pray 2030+ games are playable.
Really don’t think the console will let you run Steam.
RetroGamingUK
Member
Indeed
What can MS do to differentiate this handheld from all the other Windows PC handhelds already available and upcoming.
I mean, other than have the “Xbox” name and logo?
It seems like it’s basically just this…
RetroGamingUK
Member
vaibhavpisal
Member
Devs wont do anything.
It will be xbox’s job to playtest.
Am assuming it will also support keyboard/ mouse universally, on all games.
Viruz
Member
Because it will have an xbox sticker on it and that's enough for their consumers. They are already selling it
xbox sticker
HeisenbergFX4
Gold Member
This handheld is a head scratching for me as well since everything points to it being just a Windows based machineIndeed
What can MS do to differentiate this handheld from all the other Windows PC handhelds already available and upcoming.
I mean, other than have the “Xbox” name and logo?
It seems like it’s basically just this…
It feels like they are 3 years late to the party (as usual)
Topher
Identifies as young
Or everything will be made by OEMs. Maybe the "everything is an Xbox" campaign was meant to prepare us for that. "Xbox" being reduced to a sticker like "Intel Inside".
Punished Miku
Human Rights Subscription Service
If it's just well made hardware that's good enough. They're going to put their new system UI on any handheld, so if people want other handhelds, they can get those. If the price and specs are competitive, I'd rather go with MS personally. Some of those smaller hardware companies have basically no customer service staff. I'm not expecting it to be some super unique handheld, just hopefully a well made one.
RetroGamingUK
Member
Of course it will, it’s a Windows PC
That means you’ll have full access to a Windows desktop and apps like Steam and Office, there’s no differenceZ
There may be a game-friendly way of controlling it with a games controller, but that’s rumoured to be coming to Windows 12 anyway.
That this Xbox would also be offering basically the same thing as an Xbox console?? OS, store, BC, suscriptions.
Alternative Stores are and extra, not main offer.
You could ask the same question to Xbox console users who haven't switched to PC despite sharing a catalog since 2016...
Fess
Member
2027 means death. As said in another thread they needed a Pro or new generation this year. In 2027 they’ll likely battle a Steam machine lineup plus PS6 launch and Switch 2 juggernaut with 2nd generation titles instead. Good Luck.
HeWhoWalks
Gold Member
And why is that?
Mr Moose
Member
Everyone hates Xbox store.
RetroGamingUK
Member
You mean the heavily rumoured Windows 12 Gaming Mode?
memoryman3
Neo Member
Yes I did. A box under the TV primarily designed to play games is a console.
MS would be foolish to let people play Steam games on whatever this thing is. It would wipe away the revenue from porting their games over to PlayStation and Nintendo.
RetroGamingUK
Member
A gaming PC with no Steam access. What a disaster that would be.
Windows 12 will have a gaming mode in the same way that Windows 10 had a tablet mode.
When you detached the Surface keyboard, the desktop would change to tablet mode.
On Windows 12, when you connect the controller the interface will change to something similar to tablet mode.
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Xbox console Store is not the Xbox PC store.
The idea is to hope that the situation and how the Xbox Store works (wonderfully) on consoles remains the same...Also If the version of a game on the Xbox store is better optimized and works better than the generic PC version on Steam...
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memoryman3
Neo Member
The Xbox store is certainly more competitive than Epic or GOG or most other storefronts. Many of the popular Steam games of today are also available on Xbox Series X|S. Why throw away the advantages of a store platform and the 30% cut, without reducing store costs and hardware R&D costs that still have to be eaten?
simpatico
Member
Console gamers would never feel the PC aspects of it unless they wanted to. MS would ship it with a launcher and have a digital storefront that occludes any of the PC centric tweaking features. The upside is, for the power user, they're not stuck waiting for developers to patch old games or provide fixes faster than a community modder can. It's completely possible to give a core Xbox experience with gaming PC guts. Doing so would cost about 10% of what is spent trying to build a walled garden around an AMD APU. Which seems silly. Everything Sony does to twist and wrench that AMD APU into a "gaming console" just takes reduces what you can do with the silicon you've bought.
RetroGamingUK
Member
I’m not saying PC Xbox Store will go away, I’m saying releasing a gaming PC without Steam access would be a disaster.
Because that’s what this is.
A gaming PC.
Donald mac Ronald
Member
Do you get paid per post or word?
GHG
Gold Member
DenchDeckard
Moderated wildly
Ms. You gotta sort something to get licenses running natively on pc hardware.
Take note. If MS ever try and tell me my content is preserved by being able to play it through cloud streaming.....they will be absolutely dead to me and I will actively hope for the entire businesses down fall
Take note. If MS ever try and tell me my content is preserved by being able to play it through cloud streaming.....they will be absolutely dead to me and I will actively hope for the entire businesses down fall
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FrankWza
Member
Xbox releases a $299 little Timmy edition just before consumers are willing to pay $700+ for a ps5 on reseller sites in a generation that still hasn't seen a price drop.
Now theyre releasing an xbox pc when the bubble is about to burst as people are looking at belt tightening. That's some timing.
Now theyre releasing an xbox pc when the bubble is about to burst as people are looking at belt tightening. That's some timing.
Dorfdad
Gold Member
The OS makes it breaks this thing. It seems they are going with a full windows pc can play our game or this system which possibly removes a lot and focuses strictly on controller / light pc duties. They will need to price this very competitively and ensure it’s “console user” friendly
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
You can't use storefronts like Steam, EGS or GOG on console though, nor can you use productivity software for business, art, video editing, music production, or 3D modeling, among other things.
Consoles share x86-64 and GPU technology with modern PCs, and Xbox shares the Windows kernel modified into Xbox OS. But if that's all it took for consoles to be PCs, then the MegaDrive, Neo-Geo, Jaguar etc. would've been considered PCs back in the day, too.
They all used the Motorola 68000 which was VERY popular with various microcomputers, and these days most people just retroactively call microcomputers "PCs" even if they were never IBM-compatibles or used Windows :/
Jez is basically repeating what others here have been saying for at least a year, or what the Gestridens Discord leak mentioned over a year ago. He's just being more generic about it.
If you're expecting a Next Box that tries competing directly with PS6 or Switch 2, you're never going to get that again. Those days are dead for Xbox. MS are trying to get a leg up on Valve in the burgeoning 'consolized PC' games hardware market, likely before the Steam Machines come back (and I guess they want their handheld out before Steam Deck 2 launches).
If it's just basically a Windows PC but in a console box, and has minimal effort to make it like what Xbox OS is in terms of couch experience, it's going to fail. That'd exhibit all the problems the original Steam Machines did, probably even more.
So they've either got some extremely gaming-streamlined UI and hypervisor features planned for Windows that feel 1:1 with current Xbox using a controller for navigation, or they're going to stick with Xbox OS but add some other Windows features in the kernel to natively support a wider range of Windows applications. Which option they choose dictates a lot of things.
Option 1: Technically makes need for an explicit new Xbox "box" redundant because that type of UI package could simply be deployed out to Windows 11/Windows 12 PCs. I also assume it'd entail they have an emulator or translation layer support for OG Xbox and 360 games plus XBO games that never got Windows releases, allowing current owners to bring their whole library over to PC.
Would not expect much any "console-looking" systems out of this, but maybe you get new PCs that come bundled with an Xbox controller as default and maybe some sticker on the case that says "Xbox" or whatever. And those PCs would have the UI package already pre-installed and configured out of the box. Game Pass integration would be present of course.
This option is kinda more of the "We're giving up on hardware completely" choice. Going forward the hardware would essentially just be Windows systems with proper couch-like gaming support built-in at the OS & UI levels. They can't "push" the Xbox Store any more than they already do the Microsoft Store on PC. They can't "push" Game Pass any more than they already do on PC. Their revenue streams from hardware, subscriptions, & 3P B2P/MTX sales would drop severely, but I assume they'd count on their own software sales and remaining Game Pass subscriptions to make up for that.
Option 2: This one would still call for specific new hardware because even though Xbox OS is based on Windows kernel it is a heavily modified version of the kernel. It, the hardware itself, & Xbox Store are proprietary to MS and form an integrated package that can justify existing as its own kit on the market. However, the traditional console business model is basically dead for Xbox and not coming back, so they'd have to spin it into something new.
That's where the hybrid model probably fits in. There's both a hardware and business aspect to it. The hardware aspect is new Xbox devices basically have different form factors i.e the rumored handheld and then the PC-like STBs. Pretty sure the handheld would fashion itself after Steam Deck but maybe have some differences, maybe it uses CAMM memory instead, for example. Maybe the screen's a module and swappable/upgradable, who knows.
The "console", would have modularity somewhat like a PC, or think about what the PC-FX was supposed to have for modularity. So maybe you upgrade the system RAM, maybe can add a more powerful low-profile GPU later on that acts as a "mid-gen upgrade", and do other upgrade tuning. But the upgrades have to "just work"; no fiddling around with registry files or BIOS/UEFI settings, no need for any of that micromanagement like can happen on PC. Has to be very console-like and using Xbox OS would help ensure that I think.
Both handheld & "console(s)" probably based around a shared fixed spec, MS would have to put R&D into that spec similar to what they've done with Series S & X this gen. So a specific APU for the handheld, specific CPU/GPU/RAM/IO/chipset for the console-PC, with shared features across them. So that's the "hardware" side of the approach.
The "business" side would be around what's done with the hardware. Off the bat, they're not selling these at a loss. They're also not selling them to break even. They're going to go for substantive profit margins off the hardware itself on their end, but maybe use Game Pass as a way to soft-subsidize. That's not just for MS's sake, but also for OEMs, because MS know the prices they target will naturally cut back on volume of production. They aren't going to aim for 20 million units a year the way SIE/Sony & Nintendo do, or even half that. They (as in MS themselves, with their own manufactured & distributed hardware) are probably looking to hit 2.5 - 3.5 million units a year just going off where Xbox is today, understanding their situation, and knowing target prices for new systems will cause some type of drop regardless.
But that won't matter if each unit actually sold is upfront profit. At that pricing & volume, it also evens the field with OEMs, because they don't have something like Game Pass to soft-subsidize a cheaper SKU with. They don't make or publish software across platforms that can bring in more revenue & profit. All they'll have is a license for the usage of hardware powering next-gen Xbox devices, rights to some spec modification (enabling/disabling cores, adjusting clock speeds here and there, going with larger or smaller storage options, adding or removing various I/O like USB, Thunderbolt, microSD etc.), usage & modification of the Xbox OS UI and that's it. Their revenue & profit streams for these devices is 100% tied to the hardware itself, and if MS were to undercut them in price too much, well there'd be little incentive for OEMs to even bother.
It'd take more than that to make a future Xbox platform worth buying, though, so that's where opening up Xbox OS a bit more comes in. They've already done this to an extent with Dev Mode, but the point this time would be to integrate enough Windows kernel features & utilities to enable native support for other game storefronts, and various Windows apps. Which means Xbox OS would have to support x86/x86-64 binaries rather than just App X stuff. I don't actually know how Dev Mode functions in-depth, but I'm assuming binary support is loosened from the App X restrictions imposed on Retail Mode, and that's why you get stuff like RetroArch running on Xbox platforms. That's just me making an assumption, though.
Anyway, this is something MS'd have to do because companies like Valve, CDP and Epic aren't going to bend over backwards to make native App X versions of their storefronts for Xbox OS. Why would they, when they'd get little to no benefit in doing so? And why would MS pay them to develop those apps, just to then see a huge amount of their Xbox Store revenue dry up as Xbox owners choose Steam instead, for example? And why would Valve, Epic etc. bother making native ports if they then knew MS would gatekeep access to them behind a paywall?
Because I still think, ultimately, that's kind of how MS would try making this alt-storefront thing work on Xbox going this path. You either buy the highest-tier SKU off the bat for upfront access to other game storefronts, or you buy cheaper SKUs where access to those storefronts is tied to an active Game Pass subscription of some type. The subscription isn't month-to-month; it's fixed, sort of like with their All-Access program. So after a period of time, you unlock the ability to access those other storefronts without needing a Game Pass subscription.
Congrats, you just paid off on a soft-subsidized Xbox; that's how the soft-subsidization would function. Now whether OEMs would be able to do similar I dunno, it'd depend on if MS gave them a license for Game Pass as well but I think that'd require doing some type of revenue-sharing model, which MS are likely not interested in. That can get messy and complicated, as seen in the arcade/FEC market (in fact that's part of the appeal of exa-Arcadia: it doesn't have a convoluted revenue-sharing model).
So, by enabling native support for these storefronts, MS wouldn't have to bother Valve, CDP, Epic etc. to make native versions for Xbox OS, and they could then leverage access to those storefronts more easily. It also would let them have native support for the Microsoft Store on Xbox devices, so in theory any application there could run on the hardware. I figure the Microsoft Store would also act as a way of securely allowing whitelisted applications to run on Xbox systems; actual full integration with the Xbox Store might not be possible with this method but there are ways to synergize the two storefronts anyhow.
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IMO, Option 2 is easily the more interesting of the two, and I imagine it's also a lot more lucrative for MS. It'd still allow them to go full multiplatform as they're already shifting towards doing, but (provided they strike the right balance of price to value) also still have a profitable side venture with non-peripheral hardware. I also think it's the better option for easing Windows itself into a more gaming-friendly platform, because again if they go with Option 1, ALL of the benefits I mentioned in Option 2 no longer exist, and they can't "revert back" after going Option 1. It's a last resort, a "final objective".
You can argue that the longer it takes MS to make Windows truly equivalent to pick-up-and-play gaming the way a console experience or even Steam BPM are, the more at-risk they are to losing PC gamers to Steam OS & Linux (via Proton). But that also depends a lot on how many partners Valve can secure for hardware, how quickly Valve can iterate on their hardware, and how large they can scale their volume of production.
If the ingredients for those three things don't fully synthesize within 10 years, then TBH I don't think MS have much to worry about. At the end of the day, even accounting for the fact they leveraged a lot of anticompetitive practices to do it, Windows has over 70% of the PC OS market. Linux is only at 2-3% and Steam OS is only a fraction of even that. Also while Steam itself saw continued growth over the past 10 years (and explosive growth the past few)...it's also free. You don't have to pay $300 for a Steam account. Hardware growth is a whole different ballgame and, naturally, is slower.
memoryman3
Neo Member
I’m not talking about the PC Xbox store which is dead outside of Game Pass. This is about the console specific Xbox store, which gets nearly all major Steam games plus console only games, and is what powers Xbox Cloud Gaming today.
Why would MS make hardware to boost Valve’s platform and not their own? If Xbox can’t compete with PS, there’s no shot they’ll be able to best Valve who have an even bigger monopoly in their domain.
Why not have the Win32 developer environment encourage Steam developers to adapt games for both Xbox consoles and the Windows Store with less effort and money required? Would be great for getting niche games that usually miss the Xbox console.
Fabieter
Member
Surface isn't a console experience like the new Xbox will be.
HJuggernaut
Member
my hype just died
Dorfdad
Gold Member
Maybe I worded it wrong it’s the same concept as a stream box. Selected “approved” hardware. Microsoft doesn’t really care where you get your games anymore but I’m sure they will focus heavily on a new store front. I imagine the store will be like apples where it shows all games but says if a game is approved on your console
RetroGamingUK
Member
Because they gave up on their platform to go third party.
Have you been living in a cave this past year?
Dr. Wilkinson
Member
Sounds good to me!! I’ll be there
Sanepar
Member
Current consoles are pcs with a friendly shell too.
tTHANOSs
Member
The next Xbox will just be another Xbox. It will not be some fancy home console pc hybrid. An even more expensive console will sell fewer units than series x/s. Microsoft does need to keep making home consoles as that's where the majority of their gamepass subs come from. Unless they bring that service to other platforms.
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JCK75
Member
Then you are in denial
RetroGamingUK
Member
Because they don’t want current Xbox owners to abandon them all in one go.
They need to gradually transition while the PS5/Switch2 ports are being developed.
Syphon Filter
Member
just get a pc and you get all that already and more.A console where I can access Steam, Xbox and Game Pass is the dream
Viruz
Member
Kacho
Gold Member
Last generation Phil and Greenberg were posting constantly on Twitter. This gen Phil, Sarah and Greenberg retweet stuff once a week. It's pathetic. They have zero presence.
ManaByte
Member
It will.
CoreyFlawless
Member
I mean, it could work if they can find the right balance I suppose.