Xbox’s console endeavors have been a mixed bag, to say the least. The company built a strong reputation with the original Xbox, solidified its dominance with the Xbox 360, began to lose its grip on the market with the Xbox One, and seems to have fully thrown in the towel during the Xbox Series X/S generation, at least when it comes to longstanding industry practices like exclusive games. But Xbox is not abandoning its hardware ambitions altogether.
The next Xbox console was just announced by the official Xbox Twitter account, which refers to it as Project Helix. In conjunction with this announcement was a tweet from newly anointed Xbox Gaming CEO Asha Sharma, wherein she declared that “Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games.” The “lead in performance” bit is to be expected—basically every new console, outside those specifically marketed as lower-spec budget options, is deemed the “most powerful” by its creators. But the comment about playing both Xbox and PC games is interesting, if only for the fact that it essentially confirms something that has been widely reported and speculated about for months: the next Xbox will be, more or less, a console-PC hybrid, which could lead to some very strange outcomes indeed.
The Next ‘Xbox’ Might be Able to Play PlayStation Exclusives
Over the past few years, Sony has brought several of its most high-profile exclusives to PC, including:
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Marvel’s Spider-Man
- Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
- God of War
- God of War Ragnarok
- Uncharted 4
- The Last of Us Part 1
- The Last of Us Part 2
If you ask a PlayStation user what some of the best PS exclusives are, there’s a good chance they’ll name at least one of the aforementioned. Their migration to PC is therefore quite significant, as these are basically what sell PlayStation consoles. The working assumption has long been that Sony hasn’t viewed PC as a competing platform in the same way it views the Switch or Xbox. PC users are probably the least likely to abandon their hardware in favor of a home console, and they represent game sales that Sony is missing out on.
This makes a lot of sense, and the data seems to back it up: 2018’s God of War reportedly sold over 4-million copies on Steam since its 2022 port—not bad for a four-year-old game. But matters are getting considerably more complicated, especially in the wake of Project Helix’s announcement. If the next Xbox can play PC games, reportedly from Steam (after all, that’s what the ROG Xbox Ally can do), then that means that every PlayStation exclusive that’s received a PC version will technically be playable on an Xbox device. The idea of playing The Last of Us or God of War on a Microsoft home console is a little hard to get used to, but it would be a worthwhile gain for Xbox, which has been porting several of its most high-profile games to PlayStation for the past few years, giving its own audience nothing in return.
Don’t Get Used to the Idea of Playing PlayStation Games On the New Xbox
As it happens, a recent report from Jason Schreier, a longtime industry insider for Bloomberg, alleges that Sony is going to be massively scaling back its PC releases. According to Bloomberg, there are no plans to bring Ghost of Yotei or Saros, one of 2026’s most anticipated PS5 exclusives, to PC. Project Helix might be able to run Ghost of Tsushima, but it probably won’t run Ghost of Yotei at any point. You may be able to play Returnal on the device, but not Saros. Schrier’s report says that Sony’s multiplayer games are still expected to launch on PC, however.
Schreier’s report says that PC sales of the aforementioned games have not met Sony’s expectations, although the imminent (if RAM shortages ease up) release of the Steam Machine may have played a role in this decision as well. It’s also likely that Sony saw the writing on the wall with respect to Xbox, sensing, as many consumers have, its pivot to a PC-console hybrid approach. If audiences can play PlayStation games on a Valve or Microsoft device, it could undermine the PlayStation brand. This is doubly true if Valve or Microsoft can really compete with Sony on the power and pricing fronts.
Still, I don’t see a reality where Sony actually pulls its existing PC ports from online stores or anything like that. The bell has been rung, as it were, and doing something so radical would probably only serve to generate negative publicity with no real financial or strategic benefit. So, Sony seems to be doubling down on its classic exclusive practices, but several of its tentpole releases of the past decade will probably still be available on PC, and thereby, the next Xbox. This is certainly not what I would have expected the “console wars” to look like for the next generation, but it should be interesting to watch unfold.
