When news first broke about the ASUS Xbox Ally gaming handheld , there was a lot of talk about Xbox abandoning its first-party hardware in favor of similar partnerships. Recent rumors refuted these suppositions already, but now a more official statement has been made by Sarah Bond, president of Xbox, in an interview with Variety . The executive explained that the decision to partner with ASUS for the Xbox Ally because the two could innovate and "transform the experience" more quickly and more innovatively working together rather than separately.

Bond goes on to say that, while the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally is meant to be just one tool in the Xbox gaming arsenal and that Xbox has not wavered in its development of next-gen console hardware. "We are 100% looking at making things in the future... We have our next-gen hardware in development." She also emphasized Microsoft's partnership with AMD , which was only just announced in June 2025 and would see the two companies collaborate to combine "the power of Ryzen and Radeon for consoles, handhelds, PCs, and cloud." She goes on to comment that there's "more innovation to come," hinting that Xbox would lean further into its handheld development, which will seemingly materialize in both hardware and software. Currently, it is expected that the next-gen Xbox console will arrive in 2027 .