Project Centennial and Xbox One

The question here is... Just how much desktop Windows 10 is in the Xbox operating system?

With Sony talking about a PS4.5 and the Xbox already being beaten performance wise I think that there are two meaningful ways Xbox can retake the console market.

One is being able to run Windows desktop games and the other is effectively making the Xbox really just another interface, but one which OEM's can optionally load on any PC. Then, virtually any PC can become an Xbox. This would solve the performance problems.

I think that long term both will probably happen in one form or another.

Project Centennial is interesting here because we already know that the Xbox store and Windows store being unified. We also know that the Xbox One is an x86/64 chip. In fact the Xbox One hardware is really just typical computer hardware.

The OS layer is really the only thing blocking Win32 games from running there. Hence the original question. If the Xbox One really does (or will) contain enough of the desktop OS components to run the average game and the game supports controller input then it is really hard to imagine a reason why Project Centennial based games couldn't run on the Xbox.

This would be a decent first step towards revolutionizing console gaming. It would enable a near limitless library of games.

And as suggested the next major step would be to allow any PC hardware to become an Xbox by simply running a more streamlined variant of the operating system.