Xbox CEO Asha Sharma shared new details about the upcoming Helix console and said the industry is in crisis with hardware pricing right now. She also said Xbox will explore affordability options.
As gaming speeds into the next console generation, fans can bank on the idea that there is already information regarding the next console, codenamed Helix, in Xbox’s ecosystem. As of this post, Project Helix is confirmed to be a hybrid between console and PC, and it will play both console and PC games at launch. On top of that, Helix is said to be backward compatible. But outside of those small details, Xbox has kept development locked behind closed doors. Under the previous leadership, the console was described as a “very premium” system, and it will also be a next-generation console in collaboration with AMD.
Since then, the leadership at Xbox has seen a facelift. Microsoft appointed Asha Sharma as CEO in February, and the world of electronics has been taken hostage by the ongoing RAM shortage, which has caused current console prices to reach “out-of-bounds” levels for basic consumers. This is an issue Sharma called a “crisis” in an interview with Future Conversations.
In the interview, Sharma said, “Look, on hardware, we are in a crisis right now. The entire industry is,” adding, “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 2.75 times. They’re up 50% since they started, they’re going to be up effectively 7.5 times.”
She continued, “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.”
At the time of this post, Sharma hasn’t detailed any of these ‘options,’ but she did say that crafting the world’s most premium experience on consoles might not be the best way forward, given it’s hard to imagine consumers parting with “thousands” for the next console generation. She continues the thought with “For us, I think that we have to think very differently about storage and memory going forward,” adding, “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.”
The XBOX CEO concludes the message with “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.” While there are currently no plans to make the Project Helix console cheaper, XBOX has admitted they know there’s a problem and are at least facing it.
