PC Gaming Handhelds Could Feel Like An Xbox By The End Of 2025

Microsoft has once again spoken loudly about a possible portable gaming device. Back in November 2024 Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has confirmed that the company is “working” on a portable gaming device.but said it had been “years.” Now, talking to Edge At the CES technology show, another senior Microsoft employee talked about what could be a more PC-centric portable device, possibly as early as this year.

Jason Ronald, who has the excellent title of Vice President of Next Generation, spoke with Edge after a roundtable discussion titled “The Future of Handheld Gaming,” where he suggested that Microsoft might also create less of a portable Xbox and more of a portable PC that offers an Xbox-like experience.

This distinction is clearly confusing, not least given that the current generation of consoles are essentially closed PCs, and then further blurred by Microsoft’s current campaign suggesting that any internet-connected, screened device “is an Xbox” through the company’s push into streaming. . But Ronald seems to want to make a distinction, suggesting that the goal of creating a portable device will be to take the company’s experience gained over decades of creating consoles and bring it to the portable PC. “I would say it brings together the best of Xbox and Windows,” the vice president said. Edge“because we’ve spent the last 20 years building a world-class operating system, but it’s really tied to the console.”

The goal seems to be to bring them together. Or, perhaps more bluntly, make Windows less tedious to use on a small screen. This is something that Microsoft has traditionally not been good at. Have you ever owned a Windows mobile phone? I did it! Haha! It was so bad. Then remember Microsoft’s last big attempt – Windows 7’s terrible attempt to become tiled, compromising its entire desktop user interface that everyone used it on for the sake of portable devices that no one worked on?

While every tech firm under the sun is trying to capitalize on the success of Valve’s Steam Deck device and releasing their own portable PCs, Microsoft clearly wants a piece of the pie but may know that Windows 11 can’t handle it and that it never will again. show its face if it uses a Linux-based interface. This is likely what prompted Ronald’s claims to bring the simpler Xbox user interface to the Windows portable. However, he is modest when he says Edge “We’ll have more to share later this year.”

However, what he said now sounds terribly familiar. “I think,” says Ronald, “ultimately our goal is to make Windows great for gaming on any device.” It’s a refrain we’ve heard countless times across countless iterations of the operating system. Every major new release brings with it a new push to make Windows so gaming-friendly, and none of them have caught on. (Remember when Windows Vista launched, announcing a feature that would rate your PC’s hardware on a scale of 10, and trusting that the industry would publish games rated accordingly so you’d know if it worked? No? Exactly. ) And yet, oddly enough, Windows has Always was the default operating system for PC games, which inevitably performed much better the less Microsoft tried to interfere.

But as Ronald points out, the Xbox operating system sits on top of a lot of Windows code, so bringing its tiled world to a portable device shouldn’t be a difficult task. Obviously, it needs to be redesigned for PC so that it never needs a cursor input or taskbar click, and of course Xbox already handles this, but that’s largely due to all the ways it’s demonstrably No behaves like a PC, with its incredibly limited settings and locked-down nature. “We’re working on fundamental interaction models,” says Ronald, “to ensure that no matter the details of the operating system, it will be as similar to the gaming device and gameplay as possible.”

So the real idea here is: forget about a possible portable Xbox for now, we could very well see a portable PC that feels like Xbox for a year.

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