Rumour: Next Xbox is essentially a PC with a TV friendly shell

Senior executives from the Xbox team and indeed Phil Spencer himself, Microsoft's gaming boss, have repeatedly confirmed that they have a new Xbox in the pipeline, and they claim it will be extremely powerful. But when will it arrive and why should people buy it when they can just as easily play the company's games on PC and PlayStation now?

One reason is, of course, Game Pass, which continues to be incredibly beneficial for most players, which is not available for other formats. But it doesn't seem to be persuasive enough at the moment, so why should the next Xbox change that? Perhaps we now have a better insight from Windows Central editor Jez Corden on The Xbox Two Podcast.

Corden is known to have good insight into what Microsoft is up to, and comments on the rumour that next year's Call of Duty would be a release title for the console, and that development units have been sent out already. He says that the next Xbox is a PC built to be connected to a TV, but no dev kits have been sent out yet:

"If the info about Call of Duty is accurate [about it launching on the next gen Xbox in 2026], there is no devkit right now. So like the idea that developers have already gotten the next-gen Xbox's dev kit... that's just not accurate.

I mean the whole idea of the next Xbox is that it's gonna be a PC in essence but with a TV friendly shell that also has a specific set of specs in mind, so developers will be building for Windows PC in a way but in such a way that they know exactly what the specs will be. So maybe the Call of Duty rumour could be right but if it is, the dev kit talk is more about what kind of specs that they've been told to target for the next Xbox, not about having any dev kit."

If the next Xbox is a more convenient and easy-to-use PC, it means that it will have a huge range of games, and will also have access to services such as Steam. The days of Xbox gamers being left without certain titles will therefore be well and truly over, in fact they will have more games than ever before as practically everything nowadays comes to PC.

But it looks like we'll have to wait for it, because Corden says the rumours of a 2026 release are false, stating:

"But I'm pretty sure new hardware is not 2026, it's 2027."

What do you think of this concept?