This afternoon noted AI weirdo and new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma took to the website formerly known as Twitter and wrote two paragraphs.
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!
That's it! That's all she wrote. She mentioned the codename for the next Xbox console, then took part in some brazen throwing-under-the-bus chat by saying it's part of "our commitment to the return of Xbox", despite the fact...there is an existing Xbox console.
She also said it will "lead in performance", which without specs or competition to compare to is a worthless statement, before saying that there'll be some behind-the-scenes discussions about it at GDC with partners and studios (or at least with those still attending).
All of which is very vague and pointless, except for one tiny part: where she says the new console will "play your Xbox and PC games". That's interesting, but it's also a term couched heavily in the shapeless and anticipatory style of pre-marketing speak. Like, without knowing anything else about the console or its capabilities, what does that even mean? Does it mean any PC game? Does it mean certain PC games? Only those available on Game Pass, only those sold in Microsoft's own store?
Carli Velocci
We don't know, and so in practical terms that revelation means very little. But then, this is video games we're talking about, and despite the seismic changes (and horrors) the industry has experienced in the last five years, people can't help falling into decades-old habits and getting excited about the tiniest bit of information about a new home video game console.
And so the majority of coverage of this console "news" today has focused on that PC part, and has involved websites telling their readers that the next Xbox will simply play PC games. But we don't know that! And we don't know the context within which those games will be played! The Xbox of today is very far removed from the Xbox of 2001, 2005 or even 2013, given who is in charge at the division and the focus of the company at large at the moment. For all we know the next Xbox could be a home console with access to a PC games store, sure. It could also be a device that runs on AI, computes from a data centre, demands a monthly subscription, forces Game Pass on you and will stream all its games online.
All of which is my way of saying: this division has experienced failure after failure for the last 15 years, and we have absolutely no reason to either trust or get excited about anything its leadership says until they can prove otherwise. And so when I read "Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games", I guess I'm just a little sceptical about what that will ultimately mean!
