Developer was on the lookout for a $99-$120 price ticket

Phil Spencer has supplied up some new data as to why his firm determined to shelve plans for a streaming-only version of the Xbox platform — The console, codenamed “Keystone”, had been in growth on the studio however work was formally halted again in the summertime of this yr.

The Keystone venture had hoped to develop an Xbox different that will neither function a disk drive nor would permit for digital recreation downloads, and as a substitute would run purely as a tool to stream and play video games stay from Xbox’s large library of present and traditional releases. Growth had reached the prototype stage, with an early version of the would-be tech showing within the background of Spencer’s workplace throughout a earlier Xbox presentation.

Talking on The Verge’s Decoder podcast — as noticed by VGC — Spencer admitted that it was largely a query of price.

“The console we constructed that now folks have seen, Keystone, was dearer than we wished it to be after we truly constructed it out with the {hardware} that we had inside, and we determined to focus that staff’s efforts on delivering the good TV streaming app,” remembers Spencer.

“I believe you’ve obtained to be $129… $99… like someplace in there for [the release] to make sense for my part. We simply weren’t there. We weren’t there with the controller. And I like the hassle. The explanation it’s on my shelf is the staff rolled up their sleeves and in 9 months they constructed that factor. And a bunch of us took it house and it labored. It labored actually, actually nicely.”

Spencer stated that Xbox retains its curiosity within the streaming-only {hardware} venture. So it’s doable that we might even see a Keystone successor hit the market someplace down the road. Maybe when the know-how is extra inexpensive or the business has recovered from the current deluge of manufacturing points — the affect of which has already been felt in ninth gen releases reminiscent of Xbox Sequence X and PlayStation 5.