Lenovo’s mysterious “future of gaming handhelds” event at CES delivered confirmation this week that Microsoft is combining “the best of Xbox and Windows together” for handhelds. Microsoft’s VP of Next Generation, Jason Ronald, spoke to my colleague Sean Hollister after the event to reveal that not only are big changes coming to the Windows handheld experience but also “you’re going to see a lot of stuff as early as this year.”

I’ve been writing for more than a year about how Microsoft needs to overhaul Windows on handhelds and use an Xbox OS UI on top, keeping the complexity of the Windows desktop hidden away. That sounds exactly like what Microsoft is about to do. “I would say it’s bringing the best of Xbox and Windows together, because we have spent the last 20 years building a world-class operating system, but it’s really locked to the console,” says Ronald. “What we’re doing is we’re really focused on how do we bring those experiences for both players and developers to the broader Windows ecosystem.”

Ronald says Microsoft’s “goal is to deliver an Xbox experience that puts your content front and center, and not the Windows desktop that you have today.” For this to happen in reality, Microsoft has to tackle a lot of complex work to truly deliver the Xbox OS UI on top of Windows. Microsoft is working on things like updating the fundamental interaction models in Windows to enable joystick and thumbstick support, instead of having to use a mouse-driven interface.

What’s really interesting is that we’re hearing about all this work from Ronald, who is part of the Microsoft Gaming division and not the Windows org. While the Xbox team has built experiences for Windows PCs in the past, those have largely been limited to the Game Bar or the Xbox app. It looks like Xbox is now taking control.

Aside from the UI changes and potential for an Xbox OS-like experience on every handheld PC, Microsoft also has to tackle game compatibility. Will this combined Windows and Xbox experience still play Xbox console games and your entire digital library, or will it rely on Xbox Play Anywhere — where you can buy a game digitally on the Xbox store and play the PC version on Windows? Xbox Play Anywhere is a great initiative, but it’s only a small selection of titles right now. There are signs that Xbox Play Anywhere is the approach Microsoft will mainly focus on for this combined Windows and Xbox effort, but there also has to be a way to play older Xbox titles that don’t have a PC equivalent.

“What we’re really focused on is removing a lot of those barriers, putting you and your library at the center of the experience regardless of how you bought the game, how you access the game, whether it’s via Game Pass or you bought it,” says Ronald. “It’s really about enabling you to play the games you want in as many places as you can.”

Ronald also says Microsoft is very much focused on game preservation with this new handheld effort. “It’s really about retaining the library and the hundreds of hours of progression you have and enabling you to experience those in new ways that you’ve never been able to do before.” You’ve certainly never been able to play Xbox games on PC before, but maybe that’s about to change.

I’ve been thinking a lot about XWine1, a promising effort by third-party developers to make Xbox One games run on Windows. The team behind XWine1 is currently working on mapping the core system, graphics, and WinRT APIs that Xbox games use over to Windows. It’s somewhat similar to the work that Valve has done with Proton, translating Windows APIs over to Linux. The XWine1 developers are having to do a whole lot of hacking together of solutions and wrappers for Microsoft’s UWP app model, but imagine what Microsoft could do itself. 

Microsoft has experimented with the idea of Xbox games running on Windows in the past. In 2016, Microsoft was working on Project Helix, a way to further combine Windows and Xbox after the Xbox One was originally launched with a customized version of Windows 8. At the time, I reported that there were ambitions to make Xbox One games playable on a PC to bolster Microsoft’s Universal App Platform efforts with Windows 10. That work never progressed, but now we’re months away from seeing how Microsoft will pull off turning Windows PCs into an Xbox.

I suspect a lot of how this all comes together will be related to the new Xbox team focused on game preservation and forward compatibility. Xbox president Sarah Bond created this new team in early 2024, and I’m guessing it could eventually lead to the Xbox 360 / original Xbox emulator running on PC. There are some obvious licensing hurdles to overcome with such an approach, but I can’t see how else Microsoft will preserve the full Xbox digital libraries if it’s looking to an Xbox future where it integrates more fully into Windows.

Last year, I wrote about how the future of Xbox looks a lot like a PC, and I think Ronald’s revelations this week go further than just Windows handhelds and hint at the next-generation Xbox platform, too. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has already teased that the Xbox team is thinking about how to open up its ecosystem and embrace PC stores like the Epic Games Store and Itch.io. If that happens, then it’s a big rethinking of the Xbox console model, and to make it possible, an Xbox console would need to be capable of running PC games. Ronald is out here teasing the future of Windows handhelds, but it also sounds like he’s describing the future of Xbox consoles, too.

The key will be Microsoft’s execution. We’ve seen Microsoft try to focus on gaming on Windows multiple times in the past, with some disastrous results. The Microsoft Store on PC is still painful compared to Steam, and most PC gamers still only care about Steam. Microsoft also has the pressure of SteamOS looming over it, especially now that Lenovo is using Valve’s OS on its latest Legion Go S handheld.

Microsoft still has the advantage of compatibility and being able to offer PC Game Pass and Steam games on the same device. If it can nail the experience properly, then that may well prevent other PC handheld makers from taking up SteamOS, but the execution will have to be perfect. I certainly trust the Xbox platform team to get this right more than the Windows side, so I’m cautiously optimistic that the result will be what Windows handhelds need right now. With a more powerful Nintendo Switch 2 on the horizon and SteamOS creating some healthy competition, Microsoft can’t afford to mess this up.

Before the holidays, I teased on Bluesky that I was expecting an Xbox event in January. Microsoft announced today that it’s hosting another Xbox Developer Direct on January 23rd. It’s going to be a busy 2025 for Xbox, with games like Fable, Avowed, South of Midnight, Doom: The Dark Ages, Towerborne, The Outer Worlds 2, and more to look forward to.

This year’s event will include a mysterious “brand new game,” and Microsoft will also offer a closer look at South of Midnight, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Doom: The Dark Ages. This is also the first Developer Direct since Microsoft started bringing more games to Nintendo Switch and PS5, so it’ll be interesting to see if there are any additional announcements for other platforms.

With Nintendo’s unannounced Switch 2 console leaking nonstop right now, it also feels like Nintendo is just days away from making the Switch 2 official this month. I’m willing to bet that Microsoft will have some Xbox games ready for the Switch 2. We saw evidence of Hi-Fi Rush for the Switch last year, and Grounded and Pentiment already made their way over to the original Switch. Perhaps the Switch 2 will be powerful enough for Sea of Thieves to make the jump, too.

Thanks for subscribing and reading to the very end. I’ll be reflecting on Microsoft’s 50-year history in Notepad later this year, so if there’s a particular period of time you’re interested in hearing more about, please get in touch: notepad@theverge.com. 

If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s other secret projects, you can also reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.