The Xbox That Never Was: Our first detailed look at the ‘Keystone’ cloud streaming console design.

What do you need to know

• A newly discovered Microsoft patent has given us a closer look at the canceled Xbox Keystone streaming console.
• The device was designed to sit under the TV and stream games via Xbox Game Pass.
• Keystone was canceled after Microsoft was unable to price it reasonably.

In 2021, Microsoft announced that it was working on a dedicated streaming device for Xbox Game Pass. Codenamed Keystone, the device was later revealed to be a streaming box that would fit under your TV, cost a fraction of the price of a regular Xbox, and allow you to play Xbox games over the cloud.

Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have since scrapped plans to ship the Xbox Keystone due to an inability to lower the price to a point where it made sense for customers. Xbox CEO Phil Spencer says the device was supposed to cost around $99 or $129, but the company wasn’t able to achieve that.

That said, we never got a chance to see what the Xbox Keystone looked like. The closest we ever got was a photo by Phil Spencer, which happened to include a frontal view of an Xbox Keystone on a shelf. That’s as many as we’ve ever seen on a console, so far.

Thanks to a patent discovered by Windows Central, we finally get a closer look at the box that Microsoft has conjured up internally. First, the patent reveals that the console had the form of an even square with a circular shape on top, similar to the black circular hole on the Xbox Series S. On the front of the box was the Xbox power off button and the USB port.

There were three additional ports around the rear; HDMI, ethernet and power. On the right side of the console appeared to be a button for pairing the Xbox controller, and on the bottom was a circular “Hello from Seattle” label that the console sat on, similar to the Xbox Series X.

This patent was filed in June 2022, which is around the time the first details of the Xbox Keystone were revealed. Sadly, the Xbox Keystone in this specific form will likely never see the light of day, but at least we now know what it would look like.