Next Gen Xbox officially announced as Project Helix – confirmed to run PC games

Project Helix is the codename for the next generation Xbox console and it will be able to run PC games, just as previous rumours suggested.

Xbox’s new boss has only been on the job for a couple of weeks and already she’s announced the next generation Xbox console. Although, as rumoured, it’s not a traditional console and sounds like it’s going to be closer to a gaming PC.

There’s no mention of it on the Xbox website yet, but CEO Asha Sharma announced it suddenly via a tweet on her personal X account, on Thursday evening. The official Xbox account then posted an animation of the logo five minutes later.

‘Great start to the morning with Team Xbox, where we talked about our commitment to the return of Xbox including Project Helix, the codename for our next generation console,’ wrote Sharma. ‘Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games. Looking forward to chatting about this more with partners and studios at my first GDC next week!’

The next generation Xbox has long been rumoured to be a ‘PC in a box’ and not a normal console and this seems to confirm it. Former Xbox exec Sarah Bond previous described the next gen Xbox as being a ‘very premium, very high-end curated experience.’

‘You’re starting to see some of the thinking we have in this handheld [ROG Xbox Ally X], but I don’t want to give it all away’, she said, following an annoucement of a partnership with AMD.

Unless she’s secretly been involved behind the scenes before now, there has been no time for Sharma to influence Project Helix’s design, so whatever Bond was describing is what Project Helix is. However, Sharma will certainly be responsible for its marketing and pricing.

Various other rumours have suggested that the new device will be able to run rival online shops, such as Steam and Epic Games Store, and have backwards compatibility with older Xbox consoles and games, but whether that’s true we’ll have to wait and see.

GDC is the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which runs from March 9 to 13 and while it rarely results in any news of interest to ordinary gamers it is one of the most important venues for publishers, developers, and other related companies to meet up and discuss the industry.

The Xbox team will be there to try and drum up support for the new format, no doubt touting the PC compatibility as proof that it will be very easy to develop for.

Although its full reveal was delayed by the memory crisis, Valve’s Steam Machine is believed to be taking a similar approach, not in terms of playing console games, but in the fact that it’s a more user-friendly PC that can take a console’s place under a TV. It is also expected to be expensive, although perhaps not as much as Project Helix.

How Microsoft is going to get round the problem with RAM and other component shortages is unclear. The boss of AMD previously hinted that the next gen Xbox would be released in 2027, but the component situation has only worsened since then.

A recent report suggested that soon only high-end gaming PCs would be viable for manufacturers, which seems to fit Project Helix’s profile and could mean that it’s not been significantly delayed.

Whether the next gen Xbox will have exclusive games – as in games that only run on it and not the Xbox Series X/S – is unclear but Sharma has already hinted at some kind of rollback of the company’s multiformat policy. Although whether she’ll really prevent key games appearing on PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 is unknown.

Given the random nature of this annoucement it’s impossible to guess when the next one might come but it’s more than possible that Xbox could tease it at Summer Game Fest in June and at The Game Awards in December, where the Xbox Series X was originally unveiled.

They could also host another Developer Direct showcase of their own, at any time, or… simply post another tweet with more info.

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