While plenty of rumors have indicated that Sony has a PS6 home console along with a handheld device planned for the next generation, so far, the general consensus seemed to indicate that Microsoft will stick with Project Helix as its sole next-gen release. However, in a new interview with BBC News, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has revealed that the company has a number of next-gen devices planned.
“We’ve been hard at work on a great next generation and a great family of devices for Project Helix,” she said without providing too many details just yet. She did, however, speak about how performance will be a major theme for the next console generation. On the other hand, the company also has to deal with the component shortages that have made memory and storage modules quite difficult to get at reasonable prices.
“We will, of course, continue to push the boundaries of performance. We’ve talked about being able to not only play your console games, but also play your PC games on your console. I think, in addition, all of the industry needs to start to innovate on affordability and efficiency. That is something that we have not had to do. But with the crisis that’s currently happening in hardware and components, it is absolutely something all of us need to be thinking about and innovating on and giving people more choice in terms of how they play their console and how they purchase their console.”
While Xbox likely has a larger platform for its eventual announcements regarding its next-generation gaming hardware, Sharma’s statement hints at the idea that the company might once more experiment with lower-end devices that are still capable of playing next-gen games. While far from confirmation regarding the matter, what Sharma said could also be an indication that we might see something like the Xbox Series S planned for the next generation. The company will also likely maintain its partnership with Asus to release more Xbox Ally handhelds.
When it comes to the pricing for Project Helix, chief strategist Matthew Ball had spoken about how the company is rethinking “what the console model can look like”. In an interview from June, Ball discussed the ongoing memory shortages, noting that the crisis “is not yet getting better”.
“We are working very hard to rethink everything that we can about Helix, which is a console we are committed to shipping, and we are very cognisant of the ways in which we need to change as a company to make sure it is affordable, to make sure that it’s flexible,” he said. “We are working hard to rethink what the console model can look like, not in an exclusionary way, but in an additive way, so that as we take a look at this crisis, which may have acute effects for 2-2.5 years.”
He went on to note that, while Xbox will continue targeting high-end gamers with its top-of-the-line hardware, it doesn’t have any plans to leave behind an audience that is typically used to spending around $500 on a console. “Those people that we asked to buy a console years ago; we still have an obligation to them to meet their expectations and to have them feel rewarded for which platform they chose.”
