Microsoft’s next Xbox, coming 2028, envisions hybrid computing

theverge.com:

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Microsoft’s new disc-less Xbox Series X is far from the only news that just leaked out of the FTC v. Microsoft case. The documents may also reveal Microsoft’s far future plans for 2028 — by which the company believed it could achieve “full convergence” of its cloud gaming platform and physical hardware to deliver “cloud hybrid games.”

“Our vision: develop a next generation hybrid game platform capable of leveraging the combined power of the client and cloud to deliver deeper immersion and entirely new classes of game experiences.”

Those are the words on just one slide from a leaked presentation dubbed “The Next Generation of Gaming at Microsoft,” which appears to be a May 2022 pitch document entirely around this idea.

The company imagined you playing these games using the combined power of a sub-$99 gadget — possibly a handheld — and its xCloud platform simultaneously.

I am familiar with this idea, because it’s the one I advocated for in June 2021, pointing out how Microsoft had a unique opportunity to build games that scale from native hardware to cloud.

It’s something that Microsoft’s kinda-sorta already tried by offering photorealistic scenery in Microsoft Flight Simulator by streaming in that data from a 2-petabyte cloud instead of your Xbox or PC where most of the game is running. But the best example is still this Amazon demo from 2014 — where the Lord of the Rings-esque armies don’t actually live on your device, it’s only the ballista that runs locally so you can feel that responsive experience.

Now, in these documents, Microsoft’s calling