“Very premium, very high-end.” This is how Xbox president Sarah Bond described the next-generation Xbox console currently in development in a recent interview. There is only one way to interpret this statement, and only one reason a senior Microsoft executive might be making it at this early stage. Bond is making a promise, but also quite intentionally setting expectations — or, you might say, issuing a warning. The next Xbox, we can infer, is going to be expensive. Very expensive. It will cost more, possibly a lot more, than we are used to paying for our game consoles.
How much? It’s impossible to say, but Bond made the statement sitting next to a ROG Xbox Ally X handheld, a “premium” gaming device Microsoft is currently promoting. “You’re starting to see some of the thinking that we have in this handheld,” she said. The Xbox Ally X costs $999.99. This seems a reasonable ballpark for the next console too, considering Bond’s comments, and that the cost of an Xbox Series X currently sits at $649.99 (after two recent price hikes).
Something else is notable about Bond’s language: She referred to “the next-gen console,” singular. This is a shift from the announcement of Microsoft’s partnership with AMD on the silicon for its next-gen hardware, when Bond used the plural “consoles.” It suggests that, for now, the plan is to make a premium device only, without a lower-powered partner; an Xbox Ally X without a complementary Xbox Ally, or an Xbox Series X without the Series S.
This would be a marked shift in strategy. In launching the Series X and S, Microsoft’s prediction — which turned out to be correct — was that the kind of cost savings and manufacturing efficiencies that reduced the price of consoles over the course of a hardware generation would no longer be achievable in this generation. (In fact, prices have gone up.) To counter this trend, Microsoft said it was offering a lower-powered device this time, in order to maintain an affordable entry point to Xbox gaming. (I have a Series S and I love it; it’s such an elegant little console.)
The current language certainly suggests Microsoft no longer has any interest in this strategy. The existence of Series S has caused some issues — developers are required to support it, but have sometimes struggled to downsize their games to fit, resulting in embarrassments like the late arrival of Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox. It’s understandable that Microsoft might want to avoid another instance of splitting specs between two machines. But if the new console is as “high-end” as Bond suggests, it seems like Microsoft is turning its back on the idea of game consoles as mass-market devices altogether.
Instead, the proposal seems to be for a niche, enthusiast device that bridges the gap between consoles and PC gaming. According to a Windows Central report — which is broadly supported by what Bond and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer have said on the record — the next Xbox will be just like the Xbox Ally: a Windows-based gaming PC with a console-like interface, but the ability to play almost any PC game through other stores like Steam.
Unlike the Xbox Ally, it will purportedly play four previous generations of Xbox console games natively, as well as next-gen Xbox versions of new games, optimized for its spec. But it’s hard to imagine many third-party developers making bespoke versions of their games for a console that, on price grounds alone, will have limited sales potential — especially when it can just run their PC code instead.
Nevertheless, it’s a tempting pitch. PC gaming is bigger than ever, and Steam has a colossal audience of invested players with libraries they would like to play on the living room TV. Presumably, Microsoft’s scale as a manufacturer and the fixed spec of the device will make it cheaper to buy than a high-end gaming PC.
But, if Bond’s indication of its price and the experience of using an Xbox Ally X are anything to go by, this next Xbox will not be a mass-market device in the way we currently understand consoles to be. It will be an enthusiast product situated somewhere between a console and a gaming PC, offering some of the advantages of both — but perhaps lacking the full seamlessness and reliability of a console, and certainly lacking the customizability and upgrade potential of a PC
Since its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft has simultaneously become the world’s biggest third-party publisher and its least successful console manufacturer by far, choosing to make most of its games available on rival platforms. Rumors that it would leave the console market altogether forced the company to issue a denial, saying that it was “actively investing” in new Xbox hardware.
But the device sketched out by Bond’s comments and described in the Windows Central report doesn’t sound like the current conception of a console at all. It could be that Microsoft believes cloud gaming is on the verge of making mass-market consoles obsolete, and so is aiming its next hardware at a narrower enthusiast market. Or it could be that it’s simply happy to let PlayStation and Nintendo do the heavy lifting, sell its games everywhere, and offer a luxury Xbox device as a kind of face-saving branding initiative.
Either way, Xbox hardware may continue to be a thing, but it seems that Microsoft’s retreat from the console mass market will soon be, too.
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