Microsoft have moved quickly to shut down the speculation that Asha Sharma’s recent appointment as Xbox boss might be a harbinger of the company moving out of the console hardware for good. Sharma has announced that Xbox’s next-gen console is codenamed Project Helix and, much more intriguingly, will play PC games as well as Xbox ones.
Doing that thing corporate types sometimes do, where you phrase a social media post as if you’re talking to someone on your lunch break, Sharma declared that she’d had a “Great start to the morning with Team Xbox, where we talked about our commitment to the return of Xbox including Project Helix, the code name for our next generation console.”
She added that Project Helix “will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games,” closing by indicating she’ll be talking to “partners and studios” about it during next week’s GDC. Well, if nothing else, this announcement makes Sharma’s post-appointment chatter about the return of Xbox much lot less of a vague concept – one that looked like it might not have much substance beyond the buzzwords.
As you’d expect at this early stage, there aren’t any in-depth details about the HeliXbox yet, in terms of specs or the all-important price. Both will be key in determining where the device aims to fit into the current spectrum of PC hardware. Unless it’s a megazord designed to compete with all-singing and all-dancing topline desktops, one would assume it may well end up being a competitor to Valve’s Steam Machine for the minds and wallets of folks looking for an all-in-one PC game box they don’t have to fiddle with and can grab for a relative bargain. A console for PC games, basically.
Both devices face challenges from the current shortage of RAM and SSDs, which have led to price hikes and hardware struggling to stay in stock. The Steam Machine itself has already been delayed as a direct result. In particular, these shortages could make it tricky to offer significantly lower price points than high-spec PCs, which would in theory form a key part of their appeal, much in the same way the Steam Deck‘s undercuts most other handheld PCs.
With PlayStation reportedly stepping back from the fight over PC eyeballs, the question will be whether the HeliXbox’s ability to play PC games as well as console ones can seduce folks into the Windows/Microsoft gamingverse. The company have made moves towards addressing Windows’ lack of gaming focus with the Asus ROG Xbox Ally’s fullscreen Xbox mode, though compared to SteamOS it still suffers from software bloat and UX/UI issues. More seriously, Microsoft remain under fire over reported ties to ICE and the Israeli military, both of which are already acting as dissuading factors.
Personally, I’d not trust Microsoft’s execs as far as I could throw them to build a device that both a) fixes those deficiencies compared to SteamOS and b) resists the urge to pack itself with the same kind of Copilot AI bloat that’s already souring Windows’ existing PC players. I also suspect that, pending the potential impact of those hardware shortages, anyone planning to buy a Steam Machine will still probably just buy a Steam Machine. That would leave Project Helix looking more towards dragging console players into Microsoft’s PCverse, which may well have been the plan all along.
We’ll have to see, as we watch Microsoft’s future play out alongside the lime green force ghosts of Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond.
