Xbox has essentially thrown in the towel when it comes to console wars as it moves away from consoles in general.
Don’t get consoles confused with hardware though, as Xbox has made it very clear that production on new hardware will continue for the foreseeable future, including a next-gen system that sounds like a console/PC hybrid.
The latest leaks and rumours suggest the next Xbox device will be priced and supported like a PC, allowing users to access Steam as well as Xbox games through Xbox Game Pass and the like. This is apparently all part of the company’s plan to reevaluate its competition, as the company now sees platforms like TikTok as its main competition rather than direct competitors like PlayStation.
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella recently provided a statement on Xbox’s plans going forward, saying: “We want to do innovative work on the system side, on both console and PC. It’s kind of funny that people think of consoles and PCs as two different things.”
Nadella continued: “We built the console, because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for gaming. I kind of want to revisit some of that conventional wisdom. At the end of the day, console has an experience that is unparalleled. It delivers performance that is unparalleled, that pushes, I think, the system forward.”
So the next Xbox will be treated like a console but in practice it won’t be a console, which makes that leaked price all the more understandable.
It’s an interesting development for the gaming industry for a number of reasons, especially game libraries.
So Long Exclusives
We’ve seen a lot of discourse about Xbox making more and more of its first-party titles available on other platforms like the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch/Nintendo Switch 2, which a recent example benign Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remake of the first Halo game that’ll introduce PlayStation users to the Master Chief for the very first time.
However if this new Xbox is more in-line with a PC and supports Steam it means PlayStation games will be playable on an Xbox piece of kit.
Whether Sony will allow that or not remains to be seen, but it’s clear Xbox is putting the console wars behind it without going full third-party as many gamers expected.
The next-gen Xbox system is rumoured to launch sometime in 2027, but perhaps 2028 is the more realistic timeframe.
