2025-08-29
Ask Paul: August 29 (Premium)
Happy Friday! A very busy month of travel for me begins on Monday, so let's kick off my last weekend as a free man with some great reader questions. Clearly, we have worries.🎮 The future of Xbox is portable, or hybrid, or somethinghastin asks:Any thoughts on the "Xbox Full Screen Experience" they have been demoing as part of the ROG Xbox Ally preview? Does this feel like the "future of Xbox" to you?Yes. Yes, it does.Personally, I think this could solve some of the gripes that gamers have about Windows 11, especially if you can do the full-screen experience on any device. Might be great for standalone PCs as well, especially if hooked up to a display.It astonishes me how negatively people--for lack of a better term, maybe "fans"--react to things these days. But when I look at what's happening with Xbox, and this has been true for several years, I see this set of huge problems that could have easily destroyed this business. And then I see a team at Xbox doing everything it can to not just rescue the business but turn the platform into something truly special. This isn't just "making lemonade." It's more like they were handed lemons and turned it into gold.Backward compatibility, cross-play, cross-progression, Play Anywhere, on and on it goes, and what that all adds up to is the most gamer-centric gaming platform there is. And now we're seeing what appears to be a transition from a console family that's failed to a PC-based gaming platform that can work across a range of devices, from desktop PCs to laptops to gaming handhelds and, I think, to what will essentially be PC-based consoles. And instead of doom and glooming this, seeing it as Xbox somehow losing everything that it was supposed to be, I see this all as making Xbox better. As a business, but also for me as a customer and fan.But I don't have to watch this video to know that this UI makes sense. Microsoft has been working toward this moment for years via an endless series of improvements to the Xbox app, which becomes the shell on these gaming handhelds, and the Game Bar overlays. And we learned more recently about its efforts to simplify and optimize Windows so that it makes sense as a console/appliance-like system that, by the way, still runs Windows apps. And this is important. A PC-based Xbox means we will be playing Xbox console games on PCs, and playing PC games on Xbox consoles in the future. This is exciting. It broadens what's possible dramatically.Today, you can join the Xbox Insider Program, get the latest Xbox app with these updates and the third-party store integration, put it in Compact mode, and use it with a controller and see what this is like. And it's a lot like using an Xbox console ... but with the power of full Windows and whatever a PC can do too. This might be viewed like Apple stripping down Mac OS X to make sense in an iPhone. It might also be like Apple finally turning the iPad into a true PC without ruining the iPad-ness ...The post Ask Paul: August 29 (Premium) appeared first on Thurrott.com.
