Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has suggested the platform holder is looking at ways to make its next console, codenamed Helix, more affordable, amid an ongoing hardware “crisis”.
When the previous leadership of Xbox first announced plans for its next-gen console, it was billed as a “very premium” system, and “the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation”.
However, in the years since, the price of memory and storage components has rocketed, driven by demand for AI datacentres, forcing many consumer devices, including PS5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch, to raise prices dramatically.
Speaking during a Fortune live event, Xbox boss Sharma called the component price surge a “crisis” for the games industry and suggested that Microsoft was exploring ways to reduce the price of its next-gen console, which in current conditions would surely cost far more than Xbox Series X’s $500 launch.
“Look, on hardware, we are in a crisis right now. The entire industry is,” Sharma said. “There’s a shortage of memory and storage, and the costs are exponential. They are usually at this point in the generation, about 50% of the cost, and we’re seeing they’re up 2.75x, they’re up 50% since they started, they’re going to be up effectively 7.5x.
“Pricing is a lever, of course, but we must think about other options as well. We must think about other ways to think about the cost construction of the console. We must think about how we create different plans so more people can participate in the console.
“We must think about partnerships that will allow us to have better distribution and reach, and we must think about the experiences that we’re creating outside of that as well to reach new audiences.”
Sharma did not provide specifics on the “different plans” that could make Project Helix more affordable, though she did appear to suggest that Xbox might not view “the largest technical leap you will have ever seen” as the best plan right now.
“I think that we will continue to look at new business models. I think [that is] what is needed for console rather than just the most premium, high-performance console in the world,” she said.
“I think we’ve reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend on a console generation, and so I think we will start to see radically different business models that we never expected start to come into orbit later this year.”
Later in the interview, Sharma reiterated that Project Helix will be able to play PC games and, despite all the talk about cost, will still offer “leading-edge performance”. “But there’s material work to do to make sure that it is available to the people that want to play. And so we’re working on that,” she said.
One potential solution could be around storage, Sharma suggested, and how much is offered to consumers out of the box.
“For us, I think that we have to think very differently about storage and memory going forward,” she said. We will have to apply new techniques so that we can compress that. We will have to empower customers to have very flexible storage offerings. We will have to empower new types of games so they can fit on device.
“And so there’s gonna be a lot of innovation. This will take years, not days, not weeks, but we’ll go through it together with the community.”
Microsoft first confirmed in March that its next-generation games console is codenamed Project Helix, and that it will run both “Xbox and PC games”.
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