With the release of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally family, Microsoft debuted a new Windows experience for gaming handhelds, offering a streamlined UI that is easily usable with a controller and touch screen. It was a long-awaited moment, and something I called on Microsoft to do over a year ago, though I was far from early to make that appeal. Even before it was officially rolled out, you could already enable this experience with some tinkering if you were a Windows Insider, which we also did here at XDA, and it was quite good.

But even with the improvements it delivers, the Windows 11 gaming handheld experience feels like too little, too late, and the approach Microsoft is taking with it is once again showing that the company will always manage to clench defeat from the jaws of victory. It's another example of poor long-term decision-making leading to worse products, all because Windows is "too big to fail".

How did this take so long?

"It's been 84 years"

PC-based gaming handhelds were nothing new, even by the time the Steam Deck was introduced in early 2022, but it's easy to see that the device helped start a revolution and bring this form factor to mainstream attention. Of course, the Nintendo Switch launched in 2017 and popularized the general design, but that's a console, not a PC.

After the introduction of the Steam Deck, other manufacturers quickly brought their own devices to the fray, with the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go being two prime examples early on, joining a market that was previously dominated by much smaller companies such as GPD and OneXplayer.

But even as bigger companies joined the fray, Microsoft was slow to respond to the obvious need for a better Windows UI for gaming handhelds. The complaints were there from the very beginning, and everyone knew Windows 11 wasn't a good experience for handheld gaming. A Microsoft hackathon project from as far back as April 2023 already showed what could and should be done to improve Windows 11 for this form factor, but it took two and a half years for anything like that to come to fruition.

And of course, even then, Microsoft decided to tie it to a specific device, even if temporarily. Just another delay for Windows users to deal with, all while SteamOS-based handhelds still work much better.

Still locking people out arbitrarily

Hurting your own audience

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Microsoft prioritizes making more money over improving the user experience, but for a company that insists on calling everything an Xbox in an attempt to drive that brand into the ground, it's strange that Microsoft still chooses to make features like this exclusive to specific partner devices. Officially, the handheld gaming mode in Windows 11 became available with the Asus ROG Xbox Ally family on Windows 11, and that's it. Two devices out of the likely dozens of gaming handheld models running Windows these days.

Now, since then, the experience did become available to more gaming handhelds through the Windows Insider program, but that's still not wide availability. And while that rollout could happen as soon as next week's Patch Tuesday, it could also not. It's currently only in the Beta and Dev channels, not Release Preview, so it may not make it just yet.

But even once that's addressed, it's not all of it, because the experience is also stupidly limited to gaming handhelds thanks to a feature that checks your screen's size. And yes, handheld devices are the primary use case for this new UI, but if you're building the feature into the operating system anyway, why would you arbitrarily lock a group of users out of even having the option to use it? Home theater PCs — those used for gaming and media in a living room setup — are not entirely uncommon, and using those with a controller makes all the sense in the world. Yet, you still can't do that without some hacky workarounds. It's just a consistent barrage of stupid decisions that hurt the consumer for no valid reason.

I'd also mention that it's frustrating this requires an Xbox controller, too, though I consider that less of a problem. Xbox controllers have always offered the best experience with Windows. But it would be nice if Microsoft could implement a solution that would translate the Home button from a Switch controller to behave like the Xbox button (and likewise for PlayStation controllers if that's not the case already).

It's not even that good, either

Windows still lurks

On top of all this, it doesn't help that even with the improvements Microsoft made with this gaming handheld mode, it's still not that much better than just using Windows. From a usability perspective, yes, it's a major improvement, but this would also have been a perfect opportunity to optimize the OS to specifically offer better performance and efficiency when used in this mode, and there just isn't enough there.

As we found during our testing of the ROG Xbox Ally X, enabling this full-screen gaming experience yields no noticeable performance improvements, and that's because all it does is disable a legacy network stack that's more focused on enterprise and disabling all your startup apps. Disabling startup apps is something we already recommend doing on most PCs to improve boot times and slightly improve performance, but it's not really enough to make a huge difference for gaming.

This mode also doesn't load some Windows UI elements into memory, like the taskbar, but that's not something that takes particularly long to load. If you choose to go to the Windows desktop at any time, it actually loads quite quickly (more so than switching between desktop and gaming modes on a Steam Deck, for example), but that mostly speaks to how little has actually changed in how Windows operates in this mode.

Whatever happened to Core OS?

This would have been perfect

All of this is made that much more frustrating when you consider that Microsoft could have had a perfect solution for this years ago. It's been a long time since we last heard about it, but for a while, the idea of "Core OS", later referred to as CorePC, a project Microsoft had that would rebuild Windows in a modular way that would allow it to be adapted to all kinds of devices.

The idea was that various components of Windows could be added or removed in order to fit specific devices. For example, low-end devices that could compete with Chromebooks would perhaps sacrifice the ability to run classic Windows apps in favor of lighter, more modern experiences. Tablets could ship with specific UI components that would better suit a touchscreen, and so on. Windows 10X, announced all the way back in 2019, was expected to be the first showcase of this project on a more typical computer, debuting alongside the Surface Neo. However, both the device and the operating system were scrapped, and Microsoft chose to just use some of the UI elements of Windows 10X for Windows 11, abandoning the whole modular idea.

The sudden rise of gaming handhelds from 2022 onward is a sour reminder of what could have been. Even if you thought Windows 10X wasn't all that useful at the time — which I'm sure was Microsoft's conclusion — setting up the foundation for that modular approach could have resulted in a far better experience for gaming handhelds and done so far earlier than what we got. This monolithic approach has already hurt Windows in numerous ways, and gaming handhelds are just the latest and most poignant example of it.

Will Microsoft ever learn?

Whether it's gaming handhelds, tablets, phones, or low-end computers, Microsoft seems to have squandered the potential for Windows to be on all kinds of devices. It's baffling how a company can have such a head start in terms of market presence and brand recognition, yet consistently choose to shoot itself in the foot when it comes to expanding to new markets.

In terms of gaming handhelds, Windows is such a dominant force in terms as a PC operating system that it will likely maintain a lead on SteamOS in terms of popularity, but that doesn't change the fact it could be so much better. All we can do is hope that will change someday, but that seems unlikely given the company's history.