Microsoft’s next Xbox console might carry a price tag as high as $1,800. A new Fortune profile of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says that figure is the top of the range Microsoft has “internally been projected” for Project Helix, its 2028 console. At the bottom of that range sits $1,200.
According to Fortune, Microsoft is targeting the 2028 holiday season for the console. The console is only part of the plan. Microsoft also reportedly wants “a next-generation handheld device” on the market by the end of next year.
Details on Project Helix have been thin since Microsoft revealed the hardware in March, describing it as a device that will “play your Xbox and PC games.” These projections are the first real indication of what it might cost, and they’re high.
The price could still come down
None of this is locked in as a retail price. Fortune noted that what buyers pay could fall if “Microsoft decides to subsidize the cost,” a tactic console makers have used many times.
A $1,200 entry price would still be unusually high for a console, and that’s true even once inflation is factored in. It also lines up with the direction hardware pricing has taken. Moore’s Law has slowed, demand from AI is creating component shortages, and high-end gaming gear is pricier than it was.
Today’s market reflects that. This year the Steam Machine became the first to start above $1,000. Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro, built on 2-year-old technology, now sells for $900, and the 6-year-old Xbox Series X starts at $750. Against that lineup, a $1,200 console in 2028 reads as the next rung on the ladder.
A fight over Windows
The handheld comes with its own internal conflict. Fortune reported clashes inside Microsoft over the handheld’s software: one option was a “trimmed-down version of Windows Home,” like the one on last year’s ROG Xbox Ally, and the other was a custom operating system built and controlled by the Xbox group.
Fortune cited “people briefed on the clash” in reporting that one high-level executive threatened to scrap the handheld altogether if Windows was forced on it. The threat seems to have landed. Fortune wrote that the Xbox team is “now largely controlling the direction of the operating system for the project,” though Sharma said the two groups still work closely together.
The hardware team has reportedly been told to pull Project Helix timelines forward “by at least several months,” in part by using AI tools wherever possible.
Game Pass may get chopped into pieces
Changes are coming to the subscription as well. Citing “people familiar with the strategy,” Fortune reported that Xbox Game Pass will soon shift to a heavily tiered “a la carte” structure, where subscribers choose “add-ons for console-only games, cloud gaming, and multiplayer.”
Game Pass doesn’t work that way today. Every plan currently includes some mix of cloud gaming, console exclusives and console multiplayer, whether or not a subscriber uses them. Anyone paying for cloud streaming they never touch could come out ahead under this model.
Is Xbox being prepped for a sale?
Fortune’s profile also addresses a concern raised by “several current and former staff members”: that Sharma was brought in to carry out painful cuts before Microsoft sells off a spun-out Xbox group.
Judson Althoff, a Microsoft executive, dismissed that idea. “We would not have put [Sharma] on a business we intend to sell. There’s going to be a ton of speculation about all this. Time will tell,” Althoff said.