After the extended slow motion train wreck that was Phil Spencer's leadership, it'd be a big improvement to have a halfway competent head of Xbox.

I remain skeptical of Asha due to her AI background, but it would be nice if she's able to get Xbox out of the rut its been bogged down in for years now.

I would say "so far, so good". Asha, at least on the surface, looks to be very concerned about the future of Xbox. In fact, based on her words, she wants to make the system relevant once again.

Yeah, one thing we should all agree on is that no matter what people may fear. There is a change of leadership and while this comes with a lot of unknown; those are still changes. So anything can happen.

As you said, based on her words (you can choose to believe them or not), it looks good to me.

Insider claims Xbox may return to Console Exclusives

Honestly, I'm really expecting Microsoft to step away from Playstation and Nintendo releases. I don't know about PC, since Xbox and Windows have a long story, but I suspect franchises like Halo, Forza, Fable, and Gears to move away at least from other consoles.

And that would be a great move to sell more Helix.

If Helix is a glorified "prebuilt PC" that supports multiple storefronts including Steam, the Xbox platform should die regardless of whether or not they will step away from Playstation and Nintendo.

High prices and transitioning to PC are far greater problems than PS and Nintendo support.

The Xbox Series was long dead before any of those games came to Playstation or Nintendo.  Starfield didn't sell consoles like they expected, and they pivoted to other consoles. If not for the cheaper Series S, this generation would have been doa.

That ship has far sailed. Not only are they establishing huge audiences on Playstation (forza for was the 3rd best selling game in Europe on PSN), they're simply not building a new system viable for the masses to move to. Helix will be $999 or something like that.

At most I could see keeping content off PS6 for a while, so Xbox is the only "next gen version"

Yeah in this economy I expect Helix will simply be too expensive to achieve mainstream success, even if by some miracle they can salvage the brand's tarnished image.

With AAA budgets having ballooned as much as they have, they will have basically no choice but to sell on Sony and Nintendo.

From my POV, it depends on whether MS is able to offer it at price that is significantly cheaper than equivalent PC (I'm thinking at least ~75%), which they should be able to offer. Given that they will be Steam-ready, I might not be inclined to replace all my PCs with it, but I'll be certainly interested to replace some of them with Helix.

Not sure how many PC gamers are thinking this way, but I guess there's some amount of us that do, in addition to actual XBOX gamers who have not migrated to PS and find appeal of continuing their XBOX experience, in addition to getting access to PC gaming.