Jez Corden, executive editor at Windows Central, says the next Xbox will be a PC made to be plugged in and played on a TV.
In the latest episode of Xbox Two, the podcast Corden hosts with YouTube content creator Rand Al Thor 19, the two briefly discuss devkits for the rumored follow-up to the Xbox Series X|S. According to Corden, devkits for the new console “don’t exist”. On rumors that the development team for the next Call of Duty have the devkit for the next Xbox in hand, Corden denies the claim outright: “That’s just not accurate.”
Corden also addresses speculation that the Xbox’s new console will be Windows-based:
“If the next Xbox is Windows-based, as most people assume, you could basically spec out a kind of dev kit that targets those specs. The whole idea of the next Xbox is that it will be a PC in essence but with a TV-friendly shell that also has a specific set of specs in mind.”
If it’s true that the new console really is just a Windows PC, that would mean developers would be able to use their existing PC development pipelines.
Is the New Xbox Just a Windows-based Steam Machine?
If all of this sounds familiar, you probably remember when Valve announced a similar concept back in 2015. Dubbed the Steam Machine, Valve’s goal for the device was to bring PC gaming into the living room.
The Steam Machine never took off. Estimates say fewer than 500,000 devices were sold in the short time they were on market. However, the principle concept behind the Steam Machine did eventually find a second life in the Steam Deck. Valve’s handheld PC is the best-selling handheld PC by a large margin.
Why a PC-based Home Console Makes Sense
A PC-based home console isn’t a bad idea per se, as the Steam Deck’s moderate success has proven. If the next Xbox is indeed a PC for TV, and if it sells well, then PC developers will finally have a hardware baseline to reference when developing titles. Currently, PCs have countless configurations, so there’s no way for developers to know if a PC owner will be able to play their game—a problem the Steam Machine, with its modular design, failed to address.
Microsoft’s OS market dominance would also come into play. Part of what made the Steam Machine a hard sell was SteamOS, Valve’s Arch Linux-based Linux distribution. Many just weren’t ready to learn a new operating system just to play their favorite games.
In February 2024, Windows had a desktop OS market share of around 72%. This makes it, by far, the most-used desktop operating system in the world. While Windows-based gaming handhelds have shown Windows has a ways to go before it’s ready to drive a dedicated gaming device, most people at least already know how to interface and interact with Windows.
A PC-based Xbox also makes sense considering Microsoft’s latest strategy to move away from console exclusivity. In 2024, the company launched the Project Latitude initiative, which aims to bring several Xbox-exclusive titles to rival machines. In January of this year, when asked if Starfield would “stay put for the time being”, Microsoft Gaming boss Phil Spencer answered, “No.” And most recently, rumors have been swirling that Gears of War, one of the company’s largest first-party exclusives, will be coming to the PlayStation 5 this fall.
