Next-gen Xbox will be 'very premium, high-end experience', says Xbox President — stoking PC-console hybrid speculation

Next-gen consoles have been the talk of the town recently, with both Sony and Microsoft starting to put forth their first official teases for what's to come. It's slowly becoming clear that Sony intends to stick to its hardware-focused strategy, while Microsoft wants to continue with the Xbox Play Anywhere program by opening up the platform to be synonymous with gaming at large. Now, Xbox President Sarah Bond's choice words in a new interview have added even more credence to this narrative.

Sarah Bond sat down with Mashable to talk about the present and future of Xbox, and part of that discussion was the next-gen Xbox, along with the team's latest release — the Rog Xbox Ally. Sarah calls this Xbox's first handheld device, disputing the rhetoric that it's really Asus who led development, with Microsoft just lending its brand as part of the collaboration. More importantly, though, Sarah said the Xbox Ally is a hint of what's in store for the future, which is an extension of her prior statements.

The Rog Xbox Ally runs Windows, even though it's technically an Xbox, and Sarah specifically said "Windows is the number one platform for gaming" in the Xbox + AMD partnership announcement video months ago, which tells us a lot about the next-gen Xbox already: how it might run Windows and, therefore, have access to multiple stores. Today's Mashable interview brings this full circle with Sarah revealing that "the next-gen console is going to be a very premium, very high-end curated experience."

Consoles offer a deeply integrated experience that feels more curated than PC, so that checks out, but they're seldom defined as high-end, and almost never as premium. Those labels suggest that the next-gen Xbox is going to be more like a PC, reinforcing months of speculation and potentially serving as a warning to budget-conscious gamers. The Xbox Series S is a great value proposition, but Sarah's verbiage suggests Microsoft is shifting focus to a more hybrid PC-console–like device, the cost of which could be more in line with typical midrange PCs (~$1000).

That shift paradoxically opens up the console to more users and sheds a loyal fanbase simultaneously. With a more open operating system — likely an "Xbox experience" running atop Windows — that offers all the storefronts, including Steam, a lot of PC players yearning for a more polished, coherent experience would be enticed to jump ship. At the same time, Xbox players who've stuck by the console's side even through trying times could feel betrayed by the lack of a new, value-oriented Xbox.

Xbox has recently been doused in a wave of negativity, mostly brought upon itself by hiking up prices for Game Pass and even dev kits. Not to mention, the reception to the Xbox Rog Ally hasn't been a resounding success, partly because of the premium price, which is concerning because that's the direction Microsoft seems to be heading with the next-gen Xbox console. One can only hope that at least Sarah's promise of a "curated" experience materializes in a more refined one than the current Xbox FSE on the new Ally devices.

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