Y'all ready to rent always-connected thin clients? Because Microsoft has a surprise for you. It's a radically different form of "ownership"!
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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Then I hope Microsoft gets used to not selling their consoles... Again
That's exactly the kind of attitude we here at Microsoft are excited to see in our rental clients!
They've been practicing for a long time
original xbox one vision was 15 years too early smh
Yknow whatd bring me back? Physical boxed games with dlc coupons and swag included, offline play, no pay to win, no missable trophies, no joystick drift and great gameplay. I miss the 90s, man.
No joystick drift
I can’t speak for you but my N64 joysticks were destroyed by Mario Party mini-games, haha
Still miss my wavebird, although pretty sure it was early 2000s..
Flashbacks of the Mario Party injuries a few of my friends got from palming the stick, maniacs. It seemed to work, but for a price. Consequently they were also the ones that had the 'good' and 'bad' controllers that were distributed by a heated pregame rock paper scissors tournament. Hahah.
The best we can do is the exact polar opposite of that
I predict this radically different model will be licensing the Xbox nameplate to third parties to churn out cheap consoles. Microsoft will no longer make their own Xbox.
cheap
as if.
I mean, if only there were a way to make the hardware dirt cheap, use only a little bit of RAM and storage (so it's not that affected by current proces) and just stream the content for a little monthly fee...
Microsoft offers cloud PCs, NVidia offers GeForceNow game streaming - and in this scenario MS could also offer the presumed Xbox streaming on those cloud PCs.
Hardware is getting more and more costly, thinclients + CloudPCs could be a side effect of all those price spikes.
You may be still laughing at the moment. Wait and see.
I don't know whether one should be laughing or not, but PC gaming will likely always retain a solid core of players that don't align with mainstream trends.
Is it streaming again? It's streaming again isn't it?
Microsoft is trying to "reinvent" Xbox every couple years, for the last 15 years. Not even themselves trust their own plans, since they never stick to it.