Rumor: Next-Gen Xbox Console Will Not Be Developed by the Same Designers

gamerant.com:

The next-gen Xbox console may not be designed by the team behind the Series X, with one industry insider claiming that the project has been reassigned to Microsoft's Surface division. The purported move implies that the next Xbox console could be released much later than the PS6, depending on how close to the drawing board the project returned as a result of the design team switch.

Microsoft's current-generation console hasn't been doing too well relative to the PS5, and the worst may be yet to come, as the Redmond-based tech giant expects Xbox hardware sales to keep declining over the course of 2024. While the company stopped reporting its concrete console sales figures in 2015, it broke its radio silence on that front in mid-2023, when it revealed that the Xbox Series X and Series S sold a combined total of 21 million units, roughly half of what the PS5 had achieved at the time.

It would appear that the company opted to shake up its console department as a result of those challenges, as implied by a recent claim from industry insider Nick Baker. During the February 10 episode of The XboxEra Podcast (around the 1:57:45 mark), Baker said he heard that Microsoft had reassigned the task of designing the next-gen Xbox console to the Surface team. The project was previously led by Jason Ronald, Microsoft's VP of Xbox gaming devices and ecosystem. Over the course of his 17-year stint at the company that's still ongoing, Ronald also helmed the development of the Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One X.

Even if the Series X was selling much better than it currently is, the notion of Microsoft assigning its successor to the Surface team would not be completely out of the left field if the recent rumor suggesting an Xbox handheld console is in the works has any truth to it. After all, high-performance portable devices are precisely what the Surface division specializes in. Whether such a radical paradigm shift would even be on the cards if the current-generation console was doing well