I mean… at this point, it feels less like they’re “repositioning” Xbox as a hardware business and more like they’re just slowly ghosting the idea altogether. Outside the US, the console barely registers as a real, properly supported product. In some markets, people genuinely don’t know if it’s still officially sold or if the entire supply now comes from independent importers.
So my guess is that “Xbox” will stop being something you buy and start being something you log into. A brand for streaming, publishing, and apps that eventually becomes completely tied to an active subscription. And if that wasn’t “ambitious” enough, I am betting they will also try to use it as a life raft for their equally shaky AI business. So in the not so distant future, we will probably start seeing Xbox ads sprinkled with the usual AI fairy dust. Maybe it is real time translation powered by intelligence. Maybe it is some cloud side frame generation miracle. Maybe it is just a chatbot acting like a another player, etc.
Either way, I am sure it is coming sooner rather than later, because nothing says the future of gaming quite like another service that really wants you to forget you ever owned anything in the first place.
