May 24, 2013 3:49 PM

Game|Life Podcast Ponders the Cloud-Based Future of Xbox One

We look at a possible future for Xbox One that’s not a box at all.

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We’ve already done a Game|Life podcast about Microsoft’s new Xbox One console, but we promised you two, and here it is. Now that more details have emerged about the console, many of them contradictory and partially obscured, Wired senior editor Peter Rubin and I relish the opportunity to get back into the studio and discuss the new news.

Somewhere in the middle, I bring up this article from Anandtech, a hardware-based evaluation of what we know about Xbox One so far. I found this bit at the end to be most intriguing:

Arguably the most interesting thing in all of this is the dual-OS + hypervisor software setup behind the Xbox One. With the Windows kernel running alongside the Xbox OS, I wonder how much of a stretch it would be to one day bring the same setup to PCs. Well before the Xbox One hits the end of its life, mainstream PC APUs will likely be capable of delivering similar performance. Imagine a future Surface tablet capable of doing everything your Xbox One can do. That’s really the trump card in all of this. The day Microsoft treats Xbox as a platform and not a console is the day that Apple and Google have a much more formidable competitor. Xbox One at least gets the software architecture in order, then we need PC/mobile hardware to follow suit and finally for Microsoft to come to this realization and actually make it happen. We already have the Windows kernel running on phones, tablets, PCs and the Xbox, now we just need the Xbox OS across all platforms as well.

In other words: Developers have to create games for the Xbox operating system. Microsoft sacrificed backward compatibility to make Xbox One based on an x86 architecture, meaning it’s similar to the processors in a standard PC or the Surface Pro tablet. Microsoft is requiring every Xbox One game to be installed to the hard drive, where it’s tied to your account and downloadable to any Xbox One device that you log in to.

What if the next step in the process is to release the Xbox One operating system on a future tablet, once it becomes powerful enough? At that point, you’ve got all your games saved to your account, you log in to your x86 tablet running Xbox One OS, sync your controller and you have access to everything. Or you just run the Xbox OS on your PC. Then, a few years later, what if the same thing becomes possible on your phone?

Am I crazy for thinking this would be possible? Those who know more about computers than I do are invited to comment.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

Game|Life Audio Podcast