Xbox Keystone was too expensive in current form, Phil Spencer says

Microsoft had been working on Xbox Keystone for quite some time. Keystone, the codename for a dedicated streaming box for Xbox games, appeared on Phil Spencer's shelf a few weeks ago, but he quickly confirmed that this version of the device has been cancelled. 

While Microsoft built a Keystone box and got the product functioning, the company has no plans to release the device in its current form. Speaking on the Decoder podcast this week, Phil Spencer explained why that is. Simply put, it all comes down to cost, and Keystone in its current form was too expensive.

“Keystone was more expensive than we wanted it to be”, Spencer explained. With the Xbox Series S sitting at the $299 price point, Keystone has to be significantly cheaper to make it a viable option over that console. Since you are giving up native gaming capabilities, the price difference needs to be a bit wider, and the version of Keystone that Microsoft made earlier this year did not deliver on that front.

As far as an acceptable price would be, Spencer says he wants Keystone to get down to the $99 to $129 range. Obviously in this situation, the cheaper you can get it, the better, as Microsoft will want to use this to further drive Xbox Game Pass and cloud gaming usage.

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KitGuru Says: If the version of Keystone we saw previously was $150+, then shelving it was definitely the right idea. Perhaps in a couple more years, Microsoft will have managed to get the price down, and improve Xbox Cloud Gaming to attract more users. 

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