Xbox's next generation isn't one console - Project Helix is a 'family of devices'

Honestly? When I heard "family of devices", my first thought wasn't excitement. It was: okay, so how many boxes am I going to be asked to buy?

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma talked about Project Helix at Gamescom this week - Helix being the codename for Microsoft's next-generation Xbox hardware - and dropped a detail that changes the shape of the whole thing. It isn't going to be one machine. Microsoft, she said, has been working on "a great family of devices".

Helix was formally announced back in March with one big headline promise: it'll play your Xbox games and your PC games. That was already an unusual pitch for a console. Now stack "and there won't be just one of them" on top, and the question of what a next-gen Xbox even is gets blurry in a way I find genuinely interesting.

The good version and the bad version

There's a version of this I'd happily cheer for. Sharma has been putting efficiency and affordability in the same sentence as performance, and that is exactly the conversation the console world should be having right now. Hardware has got expensive - I wrote about a Switch 2 price increase yesterday, so it's fresh on my mind. If "family" means there's a modest, cheap entry point for someone's first console and a bigger, more powerful sibling for people who want every last frame, that's not a scheme. That's just letting different budgets in the door. The Series S did that, whatever you thought of it.

The version I'm less comfortable with is the one where "more choice" quietly becomes a maze. Several models, different capabilities, and a parent standing in a shop in December trying to work out which box their kid actually needs so the games their friends play will run. Consoles have always had one lovely advantage over PCs: you buy the thing, the thing works. Every extra tier chips away at that, and I'd hate to see it traded off for a slide about consumer choice.

Worth saying too: Microsoft is laying out this hardware vision while its gaming division has been through some genuinely rough layoffs. Optimism about the future lands a little differently against that backdrop.

Beyond the phrase itself, almost nothing is pinned down. No designs, no prices, no release timing - just a codename, a PC-hybrid promise, a stated focus on affordability, and now the word "family".

So let me say what I actually want. I grew up passing the second controller to whoever was next, on hardware nobody would have called cutting edge, and I still do it with my nephew. If one member of this Helix family is built for that - cheap enough to be somebody's first console, simple enough that you don't need a spec chart to buy it - that's the one I'll be watching for. The powerful one will find its fans no matter what. The affordable one decides who gets to play at all.

Image: User:AsmodeanUnderscore (Series S), Ian Hughes https://www.flickr.com/photos/epr / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Xbox_Series_X_and_S_with_controllers.jpg