People have been speculating about Microsoft’s plans for the next Xbox for over a year now and the company’s new gaming CEO just went ahead and tweeted them out. Recently appointed Xbox boss Asha Sharma confirmed the codename for the hardware and, even more importantly, that it will indeed play PC games. But what does that mean?
“Great start to the morning with Team Xbox, where we talked about our commitment to the return of Xbox including Project Helix, the code name for our next generation console,” Sharma posted on X on Thursday. “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 of Xbox console: Project Helix pic.twitter.com/YQUrCgCb9J
— Xbox (@Xbox) March 5, 2026
A short teaser video that didn’t provide any further info was also posted. Microsoft is trying to fill the void left by Phil Spencer’s recent retirement and Sarah Bond’s surprise resignation with the good vibes of a good old next-gen console hype train. But after releasing its exclusives to PlayStation 5 and inviting players to give up their games and hardware for subscriptions and cloud streaming instead, will anyone still be around to care?
Project Helix will turn Xbox into a gaming PC
Microsoft previously promised that the next-gen Xbox would be the most powerful technical leap in gaming ever, though the person who said those words is no longer at the company. The company’s also been banging the drum of letting you take your gaming library everywhere and breaking down the walls between platforms. A unified storefront across PC, console, and mobile sounds like a dream scenario, but it’s a huge technical challenge.
The company’s first stab at this new PC-centric, multiplatform vision came last fall with the ROG Ally X which tries to make it seamless to go from playing Game Pass games to downloading Steam games. In practice, it’s a lot wonkier than most people would like, in no small part due to how terrible Windows is. Will Project Helix have a solution to the tech giant’s increasingly enshittified OS?
As you can see, I have a lot of questions. Hopefully some of them get answered next week at GDC. Jason Ronald, Xbox’s head of next-gen tech, is giving a talk at the same conference where last year he first teased the ROG Ally X. I’ll be there too, hopefully getting some more detailed answers. According to AMD, Microsoft’s chip partner for the next Xbox, Project Helix is aiming to ship sometime in 2027. At least if the current RAM crisis doesn’t intervene.
