After the sudden retirement of Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, not to mention last year’s announcement of proprietary Xbox games coming to other consoles, many pundits thought for sure we’d seen the last piece of Xbox hardware. But not so, it seems. The new head of Microsoft Games, Asha Sharma—who was promoted from AI honcho—began the new regime by promising a brand new console. (Via IGN.) This next-gen piece of tech will evidently allow people to play both console and PC games. Behold Project Helix.
Sharma tweeted about the beginning of his regime with this announcement. Project Helix is just the code name, by the way. Presumably the real thing will be Xbox ___, with some number or letter. But Sharma’s announcement also indicated Microsoft was not out of the hardware game we we all suspected.
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.
Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games. Looking forward to chatting about this more with partners and studios at my first GDC next week!
The GDC is of course the Game Developers Conference which will happen on Monday (March 9) in San Francisco.
The big and interesting takeaway here is Microsoft’s “return of Xbox,” in the coming years. Sony had well and truly won the console wars years ago, both with PlayStation 4 and the PS5. Nintendo always does well, and the Switch and Switch 2 were no exception. But the Xbox One, and especially Series X and S, significantly undersold Sony. So, in recent years, the belief that Xbox was out of the game entirely permeated. Not so, if you believe Sharma.
Whether or not Project Helix does “lead in performance” will be for the tech folks to debate. However, a major console platform allowing for PC gameplay would certainly set Xbox apart, at least as it stands now. We’ll have to see what news we get from GDC next week.
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Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.