Phil Spencer Teases “Keystone” Xbox Streaming Box

Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming has been playing an interesting game with the media since the beginning of this console generation, hiding secret messages or sometimes new hardware in pictures of his shelf. This time, the exec has apparently posted a picture of Project Keystone, the Xbox streaming device that Microsoft has been working on for some time.

You can see the device at the top of the shelf in the picture above, which comes from a Phil Spencer tweet celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Fallout franchise. Of course, Phil Spencer strategically placed the Project Keystone device not too close to the Vault Boy statue he mentioned in his tweet.

Vault Boy left the shelter and stopped by my office to celebrate the #Fallout25 Anniversary. Congratulations to the @Fallout @Bethesda teams on this major milestone for an iconic franchise. pic.twitter.com/hGoN1sAQRK

— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) October 10, 2022

According to The Verge’s Tom Warren, the picture of the small white box is the real deal. Project Keystone will be a Microsoft-designed device that you connect to a TV to access the company’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service, and it may also support Netflix and other entertainment apps.

Back in May, the company said in a statement that it had gone back to the drawing board during the development of Keystone. “We have made the decision to pivot away from the current iteration of the Keystone device. We will take our learnings and refocus our efforts on a new approach that will allow us to deliver Xbox Cloud Gaming to more players around the world in the future,” the company said at the time.

Phil Spencer’s picture doesn’t reveal much about the device, though the fact that he’s teasing it suggests that its release shouldn’t be too far off. In the meantime, Microsoft has already teamed up with Samsung to make Xbox Cloud Gaming available on the company’s 2022 Smart TVs and monitors.