Keystone, Xbox’s cloud streaming alone would be theoretically cheaper than Xbox Series X and exclusively offer games via GamePass, but this is still years away from release. That’s with Xbox head Phil Spencer who said this at the end of October, and now he’s giving this explanation that it all came down to dollars and cents.
We know that Keystone exists thanks to Spencer revealing the itty bitty white box last month, which led us all to think that an announcement would be imminent. Sadly that’s not going to happen any time soon.
In an interview with verge, Spencer said that they just were not able to cut the cost down to where the Keystone could be priced at a point that could make sense.
Phil Spencer said that “it was more expensive than we wanted it to be when we actually built it out the hardware that we had inside, Spencer further explained. “We decided to focus that team’s effort on delivering the smart TV streaming app.”
Earlier this year Xbox announced a partnership with Samsung that saw the Xbox app included in all new Samsung smart TVs. Spencer also said last month that Samsung manufactured a prototype as well, but then inflation and supply chain issues just kept the Keystone’s price from coming down to the price it needed to be.
What is the price for Keystone?
I think the price had to be somewhere around $129, $99 for that to make sense in my view, said Spencer.” Some of the silicon choices we made at the time of designing the Keystone, were just not able to hit the price point that we wanted.
Spencer further added that Keystone kept coming to the price closer to the Xbox Series S, which can already steam games but can also play them natively, but the aim is to keep Keystone’s price significantly lower than the cost of the Xbox Series S, otherwise, it just wouldn’t make sense for the consumer to give up being able to play games without streaming them.
