Microsoft leadership has placed a lot of emphasis on , and several of their business decisions recently seem to be geared towards attracting more people to this subscription service. One of those projects was called Keystone, a dedicated streaming device that would let Game Pass customers play Xbox titles without an Xbox console. After the first, the project was eventually canceled. That team shifted its focus to a smart TV streaming app instead, causing Keystone to fade into obscurity. Today discovered a patent that showed what the Keystone might have looked like.
This contains more details than we’ve ever received from Xbox leadership about the project. The only glimpse we’ve had so far was a teaser image from Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in 2022. But now we can see that the squat, square device would have had a circle pattern on the top and a round panel on the bottom. It also had the expected cable ports and what looks like a controller pairing button.
Microsoft has been developing new hardware lately, but few of them seem to be making it through. Even the company’s announcement of Xbox hardware updates at the recent Summer Games Fest came after a leak hinted at much bigger plans. Hopefully Xbox can make a big hit on the hardware side soon. For now, it’s a nice backstory on the company and its development process to get a glimpse of what could have been.
