The Xbox ROG Ally and Xbox ROG Ally X are game changers. Though the first Xbox handhelds aren’t technically Xbox handhelds, Thursday’s much-anticipated launch has put the rest of the gaming-device market on notice — and not just the portable players.
Yes, they’re expensive, and yes, they’re hard to get — but they’re also awesome. Don’t take my word for it — I write about TV for a living (and I don’t even review that) — go ahead and Google reviews (in a new tab, preferably). The early response by those in the game, so to speak, are overwhelmingly positive.
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Ahead of launch day, The Hollywood Reporter spent 30 minutes with Roanne Sones, Xbox’s corporate vice president of gaming devices (and ecosystem). Like me, Sones is a casual gamer, believe it or not — but she is all business when it comes to device-making. Throughout our talk, Sones was stoked for today — she knew what she had — and was more than happy to engage on a wide range of questions, like, “Who are these handhelds for?” and “Why do they cost so much money?” And of course, “Are these just ASUS ROG Allys with an ‘Xbox’ button?”
And more; read our Q&A below.
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Well, it’s Launch Day — are the devices ready?
I’m pumped, honestly. There’s been a huge amount of focus and work happening on this, from Windows, from AMD, from ASUS, from Xbox. We are sprinting hard and fast, and we’ve had a ton of self-host hours. We’ve had devices seeded with developers; we’re ready, and I’m really excited to have it in the hands of players.
Maybe what I will add is, I do think that our Xbox players, they have an expectation of continuous innovation and continued delivery from us. And so one of the things that I think players will see and what might be newer to some of the new-to-Xbox players that start to get familiar with us through the Xbox Allys, is that it doesn’t stop on the day of launch. All these teams are primed and ready to go, and will continue to just keep innovating — so you’re going to see the experience just get better over time. But for launch, we are ready, and we’re really excited.
To the second point, when do you expect the handhelds will realize their full potential?
I think they start now. I don’t think we would launch something if we didn’t feel like it had realized the full potential. So to me, it starts now. Now, one of the things is, like— these are all about gameplay, and we’ve introduced a few new programs. If you look at the Handheld Compatibility Program, as well as the Windows Performance Fit program, these are all ways that we can communicate to players how games are going to play on the device. It is new to fit this experience into a seven- or eight-inch display; It is new for this to be controller-first.
And so there are things like that with the games where we’re working really closely with developers to get them to prioritize their PC game portfolio to now take advantage of the screen size, to take advantage of controller input, to take advantage of all the settings that are available to you. So, Game Profiles is a good example of a fast-follow feature that will come to the devices (in the near future). It’s integrated in with studios, and we basically set the frames-per-second (FPS), we set the resolution, we set to maximize performance and battery life. That’s a good example of something that just gets better: You start with X (number of) games, and then the number keeps growing over time.
There are various levels of gamer, from casual to competitive — who are these devices for?
I think it’s for different types of players, and I think each player is going to end up getting an experience out of it that they want. Certainly with pre-orders, for the most part, those are your pretty serious gamers. At 5 p.m. PT (on Sept. 25, 2025), they were behind their phone or their laptop, and they were like, “Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy!” And so, immediately, it goes to somebody who has chosen to spend a significant amount of their minutes of the day gaming — they were doing the equivalent of lining up outside the store.
I think that what we’re going to see though is, over time, you start to appeal to a much more casual player. I put myself in the casual-player bucket, and one of the things for me that I’ve found with this is, it’s just hard for me to find minutes. I don’t sit down in my living room all that often — and when I’m sitting behind my desk I’m working — so I don’t really want to sit behind my desk and play (PC) games. [The handheld] has just totally unlocked my ability to have fun — I’m getting so much more joy out of playing. Now, it sits beside me in the car, and when I’m waiting to pick up the kids, I play. Or I can just play 15 minutes before bed. Why not?
(Find use tips for casual gamers here.)
It’s also a welcome new entry for commuters, like me.
I couldn’t agree more.
Plus, now I can do this on the couch, I can be in the family room, in the kitchen, and I’m in the mix with everybody. And everybody’s doing their own thing and maybe somebody’s coming in, scooching up beside me and playing with me, and we’re having, like, a moment together. It doesn’t feel like you have to isolate yourself to go have a separate experience from just what the hubbub is of life. I’m just getting a lot more joy out of gaming than I ever used to.
I won’t play games with guns or blood in front of my kids, so I end up almost never playing some of my favorite games. This, I can angle away and be on the same sectional while they watch TV.
Yep, 100 percent. I’m less into the first-person-shooter games, so when my kids watch me play (card game) Balatro, I don’t have to worry about it.
One bit of criticism I’ve read is that this is “just an ASUS ROG Ally with an ‘Xbox’ button.” For a casual gamer like me, that’s what I need and want in a handheld PC. Is that criticism fair, or is it underselling the device completely?
I feel like that’s underselling the device completely. What I would say is— there is a mix of players, maybe that’s the better way to talk about it. Some people have a really strong affiliation with, “I was a console-first player, and here is what I want to see.” You have PC-first players, and they want something else. And then you actually have multi-device players, which is actually the fastest-growing player category, who are like, “Hey, the fact that you even make me choose is ridiculous.” They’ve grown up in a mobile-device world and are used to everything traveling with them, so why isn’t their gaming platform smart about serving up the right game for whatever device they’re on, and making sure they can just pick up and play where they left off?
What we are always striving to do is be player-first and obsess about the feedback that we are getting, but you are going to get different feedback from these different cohorts of players. What I feel like we’ve done is really balance across those players what we think needs to be done. I think Windows is a very compelling platform for gaming. It is growing, there’s a ton of engagement on the platform, you can get access to all of your games from any store. Players want to get fast to fun, they want to have all the games at their fingertips — they’re buying the device to play games, it’s not the reverse.
Yes, there’s a new interaction button with the the little ‘Xbox’ (logo), and it has a familiarity to it. Just like it invokes the Guide when you’re playing on an Xbox console, it now invokes Game Bar, which is the Guide-equivalent when you’re on PC. So, it’s a lot more from my perspective, and I would just say this is just the beginning. We have a whole innovation pipeline planned … We’re not going to stop, but it’s a pretty exciting start, and I think the future is really bright.
What percentage of new titles will be XPA (Xbox Play Anywhere), a one-time purchase to be played across all devices: console, PC and handheld?
I don’t have a percentage, but what I can say is we have over 1,000 titles today that are XPA, and we added 55 just in the last few weeks. So we have really rapid cadence, I would say, of delivery of titles and games — but I don’t have a percent.
I’ve seen screenshots of online pre-orders with estimated delivery dates more than a month out — was this a logistical snafu by ASUS and/or Microsoft?
So what I would say is, there’s a whole process to how you manufacture hardware. And as you can imagine, there has been a variety of (recent) macroeconomic challenges that I’ve heard from manufacturers about bringing products into the United States. Xbox has been navigating that, ASUS has been navigating that — the whole world has been navigating that. Part of the [delay] is not some logistical snafu at all, I think it’s just the realities of trying to be adaptive to those market conditions.
The other piece I will just overlay is, like, demand out of the gate was super strong. And so, you know, you sort of guess at what you think the number is going to be — and then they end up being higher than what you expected. You’re can’t just magically, overnight, create a new manufacturing line.
The alternative would have been shutting down pre-orders after that guessed number and marking the devices out of stock.
Correct. That just corresponds to, essentially, the manufacturing lot. So what happened is, we had a set amount that went to Best Buy, sold through that, and now they’re selling into the next wave of hardware that’s coming in, right? And waves are coming in on those timeframes because of just the manufacturing process, and there has been some dynamics that, collectively, the industry — Xbox and ASUS, and all others — have been navigating, for why they’re coming in waves.
Can you explain why the prices are so high, especially for the Xbox ROG Ally X? And before the official price announcement, leaked prices showed lower price tags — were those leaked prices accurate at the time of the leaks?
It’s all to do with the macroeconomic factors. I’m not going to specify specifics around what prices were or weren’t, but I think the dynamic of why you see the price as it is, is because of what we are dealing with more broadly in the consumer electronics industry.
At this point in the interview, I asked Sones if by “macroeconomic factors,” she was primarily referring to the Trump tariffs. She declined to answer the question.
This is an ASUS device, not a Microsoft device, and you can already play Xbox games without a console via Xbox Cloud Gaming. Is Microsoft out of the console business?
Not at all. This, to me, shows a willingness of Xbox to innovate with somebody who is a market leader in Windows handhelds already with the (non-Xbox) ROG Allys … As the leader of our first-party hardware, I think we have to be open-minded. There’s great things that we can accomplish (with partners) — we can move at this pace and speed and everybody’s going to win and learn. And honestly, I think players are the ones who get to benefit the most from this.
It doesn’t at all change our conviction around the importance of our next-generation Xbox devices. You’ve heard us make the statement about our commitment to that; we announced our partnership with AMD, we have a variety of innovations in store that I’m really excited about, and they’re going to sit side by side with this collaboration that we have with ASUS. You’ve seen how we’re willing to take some of the hardware IP that we do have and use that to kind of boost and get more choice and more flexibility to players. At the end of the day, that’s what should be guiding us, not some weird boundary.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
