That’s why, no matter how many times the Xbox division comes out saying “we’re releasing a new console!”, I take it with a huge grain of salt. While Phil Spencer and co. might be all about it, Nadella and the shareholders, who just dumped nearly 100b into buying half the gaming industry and are not seeing that ROI come back anywhere near as fast as they’d hoped, they may have other plans… especially now that they’ve effectively gone third party.
Even if they do release a new “console PC hybrid” that runs windows and can play all windows games, it’ll still be at a disadvantage to equally powered systems that have dedicated gaming operating systems. Now that Valve is also entering into that space to give them competition, and being that PC/console hybrids have traditionally failed, as the average gamer doesn’t care to mess with drivers, navigating windows, etc… Even if MS does put out a PC in a lunchbox case and calls it a console, I don’t see things changing much for them on the hardware front. It’ll (based on rumored specs) be an extremely expensive system, well into the 4 digit range, and at that point, why spend that much money on a PC that you can’t upgrade? Give me a box I can swap out GPUs in, add RAM, upgrade the CPU, and have it be plug and play with no need to mess with drivers/etc while still being compatible with all windows games… then you’ll have my attention at that price point. However, at that point, you basically just have a PC with a specialized OS… which we can also do with traditional PCs, and MS isn’t going to give up on trying to force us to buy a Windows machine, even if it isn’t the best OS for gaming (vs. a dedicated gaming OS like we see in consoles).
