Xbox boss wants to hit $99-$129 price point for its game streaming device
Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said Microsoft chose to deprioritise development of its game streaming device because it was struggling to make it cost effectively.
Announced last summer and codenamed ‘Keystone’, the standalone device is designed to ley players stream Xbox games to TVs or monitors without the need for a console.
Microsoft’s head of gaming told The Verge’s Decoder podcast (transcribed by VGC) that the company built Keystone and some employees took it home to test it out—it was spotted in a photo of Spencer’s office last month—but that while it worked well, it was proving too costly to produce.
“The console we built that now people have seen, Keystone, was more expensive than we wanted it to be when we actually built it out with the hardware that we had inside, and we decided to focus that team’s efforts on delivering the smart TV streaming app,” he said.
“With Keystone, [we’re] still focused on it [and] when can we get the right costs, but when you’ve got Series S at $299, and like during the holidays you’ll see some price promotion, you’ll obviously have Series X higher, I think in order for a streaming-only box to make sense, the price delta to S has to be pretty significant.
“I want to be able to include a controller in it when we go do that,” he continued. “So, it was really just about if we could build the right product at the right price, or if we can’t, how can we focus the team’s effort? And we decided to go do the TV app with Samsung and we’re really happy with the results there.”
Spencer went on to discuss a price range he’d like to hit when Keystone comes to market.
“I don’t want to announce pricing specifically, but I think you’ve got to be $129, $99, like somewhere in there for that to make sense in my
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