From a purely logical standpoint, Asus as a hardware partner makes a lot of sense given it already has the ROG Ally, which is a fairly robust Windows 11 handheld PC that can run games in the Xbox Game Pass PC catalog both natively and via cloud-powered streaming.

I understand the Xbox work that has hit the headlines this week is actually called Project Kennan, not Keenan. I’m told that Kennan is the codename for a handheld that is being manufactured by Asus, and it’s part of a larger effort from Microsoft to unify Windows and Xbox towards a universal library of Xbox and PC games.

Those rumors about Microsoft making it own Xbox handheld may have been hasty, but we could see the Xbox version of SteamOS instead.