As a technical writer, I’ve seen a lot of theoretical gimmicks come and go – or perhaps more accurately, never actually exist and then… continue to not exist. While it’s true that tech companies are constantly iterating, experimenting, and telling their patent lawyers to write scribblesnerds like us also have the bad habit of letting our imagination run wild.

Case in point: the Xbox handheld. Rumors of some kind of Game Boy competitor made by Microsoft have been circulating since the launch of the original Xbox over 20 years ago. And for even longer, anyone who tried to compete with Nintendo on its playing field – including Sega, Sony and Nokia – got trampled.

So why are we still hearing rumors about a new Xbox handheld gaming machine, a decade after the PlayStation Portable’s last gasp?

Maybe it’s because Valve has bucked the trend. The Steam Deck was a smash hit, selling millions of units in just a few years. People are excited about PC gaming on the go for the first time in a long time, and it’s so influential that we’re already seeing dozens of riffs on similar form factors from other companies like Asus, Lenovo, MSIAnd Acer. All of them use similar AMD-based hardware, but run Windows instead of Valve’s super-efficient Linux-based SteamOS, so Microsoft is working with them to a greater or lesser extent.

Perhaps that’s why people are once again pontificating about the idea of ​​an all-Microsoft handheld gaming console. Valve essentially gave them the blueprint, and Microsoft no longer needs to rely on proprietary Xbox hardware, or even local hardware. It might be able to leverage the popular Xbox Game Pass service and its streaming capabilities to entice people to invest in the console-PC division.

Valve/Nvidia

It is in the spirit of business leaders at Bloomberg (via Android Authority) who asked Phil Spencer, head of gaming at Microsoft, about it in a recent interview. Spencer confirmed that Microsoft was “working on prototypes and thinking about what it could do,” in Bloomberg’s words. But it will be years before we see such a device. Emphasize “power”!

In the meantime, Microsoft is working to improve the Xbox app (in which players can access Game Pass downloads and game streaming) on ​​low-power portable gaming devices. So yeah, don’t expect an Xbox handheld anytime soon, if at all.

It is important to temper our expectations by confronting them with reality. The Steam Deck is a resounding success, yes… in the context of the PC market. Valve has not released its total sales figure, saying only that it has sold “several million” to this time last year. Let’s be generous and assume that’s two million and that Valve has sold two million more Steam Decks since then. (If they had hit the 10 million mark, I think they would have made it public and celebrated.) So less than five million Steam Decks total, and maybe half that number in the same form factor, like the ROG Ally.

Compare that to the number of portable Switch consoles Nintendo has sold over the system’s seven-year lifespan: nearly 150 million.

You can’t blame Microsoft for feeling a little timid in the face of Valve, which must have experimented for a decade with the Steam controller, Steam machines, and Steam Link before suffering a hardware problem. And Microsoft isn’t exactly in a position to bet big on hardware at the moment, being by far the last of the current generation of consoles.

For a large company looking for stable returns – a company diversified well beyond the gaming market, even if you think of it as the “manager” of PC gaming – it makes sense to let partners like Asus take big risks.

In the (approximate) words of the immortal Regina George…

Paramount Pictures

So if you’re waiting for a portable Xbox, stop waiting. Buy a Steam Deck and enjoy. (There is even a new white and elegant version arrives!) Or maybe get a ROG Ally if you want to run Windows. You can also stream games to your phone via Xbox Game Pass or Nvidia GeForce Now, and maybe get one of those new 8BitDo controllers. The future is now, even if you have to change a few settings to make everything work properly.