The Xbox brand has had an interesting few years, but it kicked off 2026 with some major changes. On February 20, Xbox changed its leadership, with Phil Spencer retiring and Sarah Bond resigning. Stepping into Spencer’s shoes was Asha Sharma, who previously served as President of CoreAI Product at Microsoft. It remains to be seen how Sharma will perform in her new role, but there has been plenty of drama surrounding her credentials and whether or not she even knows anything about the gaming industry. It does look like she’s trying to say and do the right things, though, at least to appease the ever overly dramatic gaming community.
Today, Sharma shared on social media that Project Helix, which is the code name for Xbox’s next-generation console, will not only lead in performance, but will also play Xbox and PC games. She’ll be talking more about it with partners and studios at her first GDC next week. Anyone who has been following Xbox basically saw this coming, and those who believed the next Xbox wouldn’t just be a PC were just huffing copium. The ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X handhelds were a test, and it seems like it was a good enough test. Microsoft clearly wants to unite Windows Gaming with the Xbox brand and it makes sense. Ultimately, there’s little reason to develop a game that natively runs on a console that isn’t selling very well. Xbox first-party developers can focus on creating PC games that are optimized to run on Project Helix’s hardware specs.
All of this won’t matter if it’s not affordable though. Xbox will have to subsidize the cost of what is essentially a PC if it is going to be successful. Yes, you could think of it like a Steam Machine but running Windows, but that’s a pretty big difference. As I said in my review of the ROG Xbox Ally X, the Xbox Full Screen Experience is not even close to the ease of use of SteamOS, and there is still a long way to go for it to deliver a console-like experience.
It’ll be interesting to hear more about the next-generation Xbox, because it really won’t be a console. It’s going to be a PC wrapped in a console-like body, with hopefully a console-like OS experience with Windows underneath.
