The point of the study that included the Xbox Next PC was to determine what consumers want to see in next generation machines and what they're willing to pay for those features.Gathering pricing sensitivity data for products is one of the most challenging market research projects for hardware developers.
It's important to note that any product looked at in these sorts of studies is conceptual and may undergo dramatic feature changes before hitting the market if, in fact, it manages to emerge from the doors of the R&D labs.
"If you put two and two together, there's no doubt there's a great opportunity to put the two platforms together," said Moore. "Obviously with a company like Microsoft this is something we have to look into and ask about. Is it actionable today? Probably not, but it's something we need to look at."
There is, of course, a greater question of whether consumers would have any interest in a console/PC hybrid. Game machines, historically, have evolved rather slowly. Large leaps haven't been rewarded. Sony learned this lesson with the introduction of the PSX, a combination PlayStation 2/Digital Video Recorder, which sold poorly in Japan and has yet to receive a U.S. launch date.
Microsoft first showed interest in bringing the PC and Xbox closer together in March at the Game Developer's Conference, when it unveiled XNA, a software development platform meant to allow developers to skip writing boilerplate code that often bogs down the time it takes to create a game.
The same platform would open up cross-platform integration opportunities, letting PC and Xbox owners play in the same world, though each would have different experience. (PC gamers, for example, could act as virtual generals in a strategy game, coordinating troop movements, while Xbox players playing an action version of the same title would fight the battles.)
"There will come a day in the not too distant future that [PC] games will be interchangeable between Windows and the Xbox," Moore told me at the recently completed E3 trade show.
Should Microsoft move forward with a hybrid machine, it will likely come after a standalone Xbox 2 unit is released. As for when we'll see next generation Xboxes on store shelves - officially, Microsoft isn't commenting, but it has been giving publishers guidance to plan for a 2005 launch.
