The $1,000 Asus ROG Xbox Ally X alone won’t be enough to tide gamers over until the next-gen Xbox arrives. It’s a factor of cost and expectation. Even if the next so-called Xbox is far more of a PC than what gamers are used to, that doesn’t mean it has to feel like a Windows machine. The problem is players don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes, and it’s time the company became more transparent about what’s in store to help us understand what’s on the line for Xbox’s future.
In an interview with Variety, Xbox President Sarah Bond reconfirmed the company is making a next-gen Xbox. However, for now, it’s still trying to re-contextualize what “Xbox” even means anymore. Bond said Microsoft set the price of the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X based on Asus, “because this is their hardware.” Of course, Asus is one of the major PC original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that is tapped into the computing market, not necessarily consoles. Asus and fellow PC maker Lenovo set their prices of their top-end handheld PCs at $1,000 or more. For instance, Lenovo’s 2023 handheld, the Lenovo Legion Go, cost $700 at launch with AMD’s top-end handheld chip. The sequel, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 with a screen and chip upgrade (the same AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme as the ROG Xbox Ally X), costs $1,350.
PC makers have been put through the wringer over President Donald Trump’s rotating, often nonsensical tariffs and resulting international trade war. These companies (Asus is headquartered in Taiwan and Lenovo in China) cannot subsidize their hardware nearly as much as Microsoft can. And still, Microsoft boosted the price of the five-year-old Xbox Series X by $150—up to $650. This year, Microsoft also hiked prices of its Game Pass Ultimate subscription from $20 to $30. Getting access to all of Game Pass’ day-one titles would end up costing players $360 a year.
‘Is it actually just a branded laptop with joysticks?’
Xbox is treating the ROG Xbox Ally like a true-blue Xbox, despite the fact that any regular console gamer might get confused when they load up their device and realize OneDrive and Microsoft Teams come pre-installed, and their Xbox-specific games cannot run on the handheld hardware (though some cross-saves between console and PC will work on the ROG Xbox Ally). Bond repeatedly explained that the company sold out of Xbox Ally X devices on the Xbox Store. That may be more indicative of how many Asus and Microsoft decided to manufacture. PC makers do not expect to sell millions upon millions of units, at least judging by sales numbers from analyst firm IDC cited by The Verge.
The new handheld runs on a version of Windows with a unique interface called the “full screen experience.” It allows users to operate the Xbox Ally with a controller and still access the Xbox app and other game launchers like Steam. The UI makes the Xbox Ally one of the best Windows handhelds to date. It’s still far from finished. There are multiple issues putting the device to sleep, including one that drains the battery rapidly after pressing the power button, but Xbox told us it’s working on correcting those flaws.
The bigger issue is how Xbox gamers seem like they don’t understand what the device is. The original Xbox that launched in 2001 was based around PC components and a version of Windows, yet any base user could hardly tell it was a PC in console clothing. The man who’s often credited as the father of the original Xbox, Seamus Blackley, recently wrote on Bluesky, “Is it actually just a branded laptop with joysticks?” referring to the Xbox Ally.
Talking to Variety, Bond repeatedly tried to insinuate that the handheld was an Xbox, but that the ROG Xbox Ally X was an option for the “power players.” The regular $600 Xbox Ally that tries to enforce gaming at 720p instead of the screen’s native 1080p is for a “casual” crowd. The argument falls flat when you consider how a Switch 2 handheld costs $450 and will play many games at the native 1080p resolution.
We need something more from Xbox in 2026
There are several major games Xbox is promoting at the end of the year. It has titles like Ninja Gaiden 4 to remind us of the original hard-as-nails ninja action title on the original Xbox. There’s also Obsidian’s satirical The Outer Worlds 2 and indie darling Double Fine’s Keeper launching this month. That’s a hearty number of new games, and I wouldn’t dub any of them less worthy of attention just because they’re being buoyed by Xbox.
And still, the larger Xbox audience has been feeling down in the dumps recently. It’s hard to get excited about gaming when everything costs more. These upcoming games weren’t built with the Xbox Ally X in mind, but they are all playable on the handheld so long as you don’t mind lowering graphics settings. If this were a real console release, Xbox would have forced developers to design around the 7-inch Xbox Ally screen and create default settings to make the titles look good despite hardware limitations. Just look at how well Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Wars Outlaws run on the Switch 2, all thanks to fine-tuning from the games’ developers.
All of this comes down to hardware. The next-gen Xbox—and PlayStation for that matter—will likely make use of AMD RDNA 5 microarchitecture. Who cares? The big update beyond performance improvements is that it will let more gamers access AMD’s FidelityFX AI upscaling. This takes frames rendered at a lower resolution and uses AI to upscale them while keeping the better performance. The Switch 2 is making use of a relatively old Nvidia SoC, or system on a chip. But because it has access to Nvidia’s AI upscaling tech—namely DLSS—it can run intensive games at a stable frame rate at the handheld’s native resolution.
There are reasons to get excited, but Xbox needs to tell gamers why it matters. Bond said about the Xbox Ally, “What we saw here was an opportunity to innovate in a new way and to bring gamers another choice, in addition to our next-gen hardware.” The next Xbox console may not be here until 2027. It will be a long, long 2026 if we don’t hear from Xbox in all that time.