Xbox boss 'thinking about affordability' of next-gen console
BBC News
Xbox says its next console has to stay affordable as hardware costs jump. It may also let players carry disc games into digital form on future consoles.
Based on reporting by BBC News — read the original for the full story.
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Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma says the company has to be thinking about affordability as it plans its next console. The reason, she told the BBC, is a crunch in hardware prices that is being pushed higher in part by AI spending and the scramble for components like RAM.
That pressure is already showing up across gaming hardware. Sharma said console makers have, for the first time, been forced to raise prices years after launch. She called the situation “Rampocalypse,” and said the industry now has to pay attention to efficiency and affordability in a way it hasn’t had to before.
The other big shift is about how games are owned. Xbox is preparing to let players turn 1,000 disc-based titles into digital entitlements, which means a supported game can be inserted once and then tied to the player’s account. If that disc is later sold second-hand, the digital rights would move with it to the new owner.
That could make old libraries easier to carry forward. Sharma said Xbox has long pushed backwards compatibility and suggested that will continue into future generations, but she would not say whether the next console, codenamed Project Helix, will include a disc drive at all.
The move lands in a messy moment for physical media. Sony has said new PlayStation games will stop coming out on discs from January 2028, and Grand Theft Auto VI is also set to launch without a physical disc. Sharma said players should still have a choice between physical and digital, but Xbox is clearly preparing for a future where that choice may be thinner than it used to be.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is Microsoft doing the classic platform-holder move: call it “choice” while quietly steering everyone toward the version that’s easier to manage and harder to resell. The odd part isn’t that discs are fading; it’s that AI infrastructure is now helping make game hardware more expensive, which is a lovely little way for one shiny industry boom to tax another.
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