A few months ago, we heard rumors of a device from Microsoft under the name of Keystone. Reports claimed that, with this gadget, you could play your favorite titles just by connecting it to your television. Thus, the need for a console itself was eliminated, being replaced by a kind of Chromecasta controller, and an Xbox Game Pass subscription.
Today, Microsoft has decided to come clean about the existence of this Keystone device. In fact, it was Phil Spencer himself who revealed during the Tech Live conference in The Wall Street Journal what are your expectations for the gadget, and when could we see it officially.
“Keystone was the code name for something we were incubating internally, which was… a streaming console,” says Phil Spencer in the presentation. Here, he further confirms that it is a device “inexpensive, you plug it into your TV, and you’ll be able to stream Xbox games“.
Microsoft continues to study the development of Keystone, its streaming Xbox console
Although everything sounds pretty good so far, there seems to have been a problem during the development of Keystone. In this same interview, Spencer mentions that it was this past spring when they decided to turn the screw on development.. In this way, they began to work on the Xbox application dedicated to Samsung TVs, leaving aside the development of a dedicated device.
We put an app on Samsung TV that lets you play Xbox titles, and I still have the prototype; It’s on the shelf behind my computer.
phil spencer
Now all we know is that the company has no plans to release the device too soon. In fact, according to Phil Spencer, the possible production of this gadget is quite likely, although the head of Xbox believes that “it is years away”.
For this reason, it is unlikely that we will see a device of this style in the coming months. Until now, Microsoft has been quite focused on bringing its video games and ecosystem to as many devices as possible. Thus, it has launched services such as Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming, with which you can play a wide variety of titles, and on almost any device you can imagine.
Why have they paused the development of this device?
phil spencer has not commented on the reasons behind this decision. Thus, we can only speculate based on the clues we have been able to obtain.
One of the most promising theories has to do with the size of the device. Based on Spencer’s shelf pictures, the Keystone appeared to be a gadget smaller than an Xbox Series S. Nonetheless, it was still substantially larger than others like Chromecast or Amazon Fire Stick TV.
A) Yes, perhaps the company is studying a redesign of it. Of course, this is not a sure thing, and there could be any other reason behind the decision made by those from Redmond.
for now, Microsoft is pretty focused on bringing Xbox Cloud Gaming to a wider range of TVs. Although it has already launched an app for Samsung brand TVs, these can only transmit a maximum of 60 fps at 1080p resolution. Other services of this style, such as NVIDIA’s GeForce Now, manage to achieve resolutions up to 1440p at 120 fps.