The Xbox Series consoles’ lifespan has seen Microsoft’s gaming ambitions shot into the stratosphere by the $67.9 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. At the same time, the Series X and Series S consoles — despite being arguably Xbox’s best hardware to date — have sold poorly, falling behind even their unpopular predecessor Xbox One, never mind PlayStation 5 and the all-conquering Nintendo Switch. The results have been chaotic: a leadership change, mass layoffs, the closure and divestment of several studios.
Console exclusivity for first-party was seemingly abandoned, but is now (partially) back on the menu. Game Pass is in flux, with multiple changes in bundling and pricing strategy, and more on the way. Microsoft has finally solved the drought of first-party games that plagued it during the Xbox One era and the first years of the Xbox Series — but, ironically, it seems to have nowhere useful to put all those games.
All that being the case, predictions of the death of Xbox consoles are not hard to come by. But Microsoft has already announced the next generation of Xbox console, codenamed Project Helix. Here’s what we know so far.
A new report in Fortune, profiling Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, says that Microsoft's projections set the cost of the next Xbox between $1,200 and $1,800. It is possible, however, that the cost could be brought down if Microsoft decides to subsidize it. The report also gives us the firmest indication yet of a release date, saying that the plan is to release the new console in time for the 2028 holiday season.
More surprisingly, perhaps, it seems the dream of an in-house Xbox handheld has not died, and the device could be coming sooner than you might think. A "next-generation handheld device" is planned in time for holiday 2027. According to reporting by Fortune, Microsoft plans to release the next Xbox console by the 2028 holiday season.
This appears to be a delay: in early 2026, reporting and comments from chip supplier AMD pegged the console for a late 2027 release. A 2027 release would have been consistent with an industry-standard seven-year lifespan for the Xbox Series consoles, which launched in late 2020. But the delay is not surprising.
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