Personally, however, I do not believe that it will come so.

Subsidizing the console

I assume that the new consoles will be priced at a maximum of 500 €, because otherwise they will have a hard time on the market. Sony already had to find that out with the Playstation 3. Its high price made the cheaper Xbox 360 very popular.

However, the new consoles should also be powerful. As a result, they are often more expensive to produce than the retail price. The manufacturers finance the devices through game sales.

But now I'm also supposed to be able to simply start Windows and use Steam and Co. Here, Microsoft earns nothing from the games. The financing model is therefore invalid. Why should I buy games in the Xbox/Microsoft Store that I can also buy in Steam?

Price pressure for AMD

AMD is also unlikely to be very enthusiastic about the idea. Microsoft gets the components with a decent discount due to the large purchase volumes. In addition, the hardware is quite powerful. A normal end user won't be able to put together an equivalent PC for the same money.

However, AMD sells CPUs and graphics cards for the end user. They would destroy this market themselves. Why should I spend 350€ for a CPU and another 350€ for a (worse) graphics card, when I have everything for 500€ in an Xbox?

Architecture of the Xbox

I'm not a professional when it comes to hardware. Since I don't play on consoles either, I've also only half-heartedly followed the news about the Xbox's hardware. Nevertheless, I remember that the Xbox is supposed to have quite little, but very fast DDR6 RAM. A very fast SSD is supposed to serve as an additional cache when the RAM is not enough.

This is a very special architecture, which Windows games probably can't handle just like that. Adding an intermediate layer to Windows here is also a bit of a hassle.

My guess and your opinion

I don't think that the rumor will come like this. If there is a Windows, then at most you will be able to run old games and office applications with it. That wouldn't be stupid. You get an office PC and stay in the Microsoft ecosystem.

If it does come, then Sony can pack up. But how Microsoft will finance it is unclear to me.

What do you think about the rumor?

Stay fluffy!