On his personal Twitter account, Phil Spencer expressed congratulations to the Fallout franchise on its 25th Anniversary today. However, along with showing off the Vault Boy bobblehead that was on his desk, Spencer also purposefully teased us with a look at the old version of Xbox’s Project Keystone system elsewhere in his space.
Microsoft themselves confirmed what the console was shortly after the tweet went out, so we did catch a glimpse at what the real-life version actually looks like. However, that still doesn’t give us much of an indication of what it can do, especially since it was confirmed to be an old model, and Spencer has previously stated that Keystone went back to the drawing board at least once to make sure it worked properly.
Project Keystone is supposedly an Xbox streaming service that will allow players to access a wide variety of Xbox services, such as the Cloud Gaming service, along with various streaming apps like Netflix and more. However, we don’t know all that much about it yet, and Xbox will likely keep quiet until they’re ready to unveil it.
Xbox has previously attempted to go the “Entertainment Center” route with the Xbox One when it was first released, touting it as a cable box that could play games. Owners could hook it up to their TV and control it through the Kinect voice module, watch TV, use apps, and more on it.
However, this was far from a popular decision for a number of reasons, all of which contributed to the Xbox One lagging far behind the Playstation 4 in the last generation. Project Keystone is likely a second attempt at this that makes the multimedia portion of the console entirely optional.
Depending on the capabilities of Project Keystone, it could also signal another, cheaper alternative to a full-on console for those people who want to play Xbox games but are unable to afford (or locate) an Xbox Series X, or have a more portable way of taking your console with you on the road. Still being able to access Xbox’s Cloud Gaming service is a big step, especially with how popular Game Pass is.
Either way, we’ll have to wait until Xbox is actually ready to show off Project Keystone in the future before we can really make any assumptions about it. The thing still has no release date, so all we can do is wait and guess as to what all Project Keystone can do.
