The long-rumored 'Keystone' Xbox cloud console has been spotted by Windows Central in a patent filing issued in the United States. The Xbox Keystone project was set aside over two years ago. At the time, Microsoft said:
We have made the decision to pivot away from the current iteration of the Keystone device. We will take our learnings and refocus our efforts on a new approach that will allow us to deliver Xbox Cloud Gaming to more players around the world in the future.
A few months later, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer returned to the subject, revealing that the pricing was the main issue.
The console we built that now people have seen, Keystone, was more expensive than we wanted it to be when we actually built it out with the hardware that we had inside.
With Keystone, we’re still focused on it and when can we get the right costs, but when you’ve got Series S at $299, and like during the holidays you’ll see some price promotion, you’ll obviously have Series X higher, I think in order for a streaming-only box to make sense, the price delta to S has to be pretty significant. I want to be able to include a controller in it when we go do that.
I don’t want to announce pricing specifically, but I think you’ve got to be $129, $99, like somewhere in there for that to make sense in my view, that we just weren’t there. We weren’t there with the controller. And I love the effort. It worked really, really well.
It sounded like Spencer was really into the vision. Chances are Microsoft is still working on a way to lower costs to get the price where it needs to be, thus resurrecting Keystone (or a new version of it, anyway). Meanwhile, Xbox Cloud Gaming for owned games is scheduled to launch later this year, and last month, mouse and keyboard support was rolled out for 26 games.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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