Not an official announcement, but it’s probably safe to assume an Xbox handheld is in development.
I’m assuming it’s gonna be a lame attempt to capitalize on the steam deck’s success with hope that popular DRM game exclusives will drive sales.
Although I’m pretty sure the MSI Claw already proved that won’t work. Even if it had been good in hardware, the addition of only a few select games didn’t justify the cost or performance of windows on a handheld.
Unless they put some actual development and research behind it, which they won’t, it’ll probably last only a few years before they have to cancel due to sunk cost and lack of game sales.
They’d need to properly place DirectX with a clean NT kernel on some good hardware, and make a completely new (and usable) UI like Xbox without sacrificing battery power, which even the deck struggled to accomplish.
Considering how cruddy windows 11 has been, Xbox nuking teams left & right, and MSFT throwing all their budget at AI, I just don’t see it happening.
I consider this comment naive. Microsoft selling a powerful arm based handheld might be extremely successful and totally viable. They have already done the rnd for x86 backwards compatibility on arm and have a close relationship with Qualcomm.
On top of this, I doubt many of the Steam Deck’s current competitors could have sold at a loss like Valve did (IIRC, they sold at a loss or at least pretty close to it). Microsoft, however, definitely has the spare money as a larger corp if they decided to really back the XBox/Gaming division. Price-wise, they could compete. If they’re in the same pricing ballpark, manage a reasonable quality handheld, and can promise perfect windows compatibility with games, that might be something.
I guess but Microsoft truly feels like it is abandoning any commitment to making Windows function well for users.
They basically seem to think people have no choice and that they can focus their entire business on turning Windows into a surveillance advertisement platform.
In this environment, launching a windows handheld would be a laughable joke honestly.
The numbers don’t show it yet, but in the longterm Windows has catastrophically lost the home user operating system market and they deserve to for their awful stewardship of the market.
