In 2021, Xbox planned to sell a console specializing in cloud gaming, codenamed Keystone. If the project was abandoned for various reasons, we finally have a real glimpse of the design of the console thanks to a patent filed in 2022 by Microsoft.
Mentioned for the first time in 2021 by Xbox, the Keystone project materialized in an HDMI multimedia box to play Game Pass games streaming on any screen or television.
If the machine was close to the heart of Phil Spencer, now president of Microsoft Gaming, it was abandoned in 2022 for cost reasons, particularly in the face of the very competitive Xbox Series S. A price below 100 dollars was considered, but never achieved by the Xbox teams.
So why are we talking about it again in 2024? Because the Xbox Keystone patent was discovered by the site Windows Central which gives us a real glimpse of its design, while we briefly saw it in photos at Phil Spencer in 2022.
An Xbox Series S in square format
In this patent application filed two years ago, we can discover in detail the aesthetic vision of the Keystone project. The console then took a square shape with a circular shape on each side of the console, like that found on the Xbox Series S.
At the back, we found a very classic connectivity offering with an HDMI port, an Ethernet port as well as the power port. On the side, Xbox had probably thought of a pairing port with a controller. Finally, on the front, we found a USB-A port as well as the power button.
Nothing transcendental then, but it is not every day that such an advanced hardware project is abandoned in this way. At the microphone of The Verge At the time, Phil Spencer revealed that its development took nine months, during which several working prototypes were produced.
A project logically abandoned
Among the reasons for this failure are the controller, which would therefore have been different from those delivered with the Xbox Series (with a Wi-Fi connection system, we imagine), but also the interface. It is the envisaged price which definitively sealed the fate of the Xbox Keystone, which now only exists among certain Xbox employees and as a diagram in this patent.
Above all, a third machine when Xbox has definitively lost the commercial battle with Sony on the sale of consoles would not have been the most judicious. Cloud gaming has not yet become popular among gamers and the Xbox Series S fulfills its function of “console to Game Pass ».
However, streaming gaming has not been abandoned by Xbox, which this year will allow users to play all the games in their library on the cloud. Enough to revive a little interest in this mode of consumption which still remains marginal among players.
