Microsoft says the Surface gaming laptop dream is dead

For years, consumers have wondered if Microsoft would ship a gaming laptop. We have an answer, at least from the Surface side of the house: No.

Brett Ostrum, the corporate vice president of Surface Devices at Microsoft, told PCWorld that Microsoft doesn’t feel obligated to ship a gaming laptop with the Surface brand attached. It was a timely question, as Microsoft is navigating the role of Surface devices in this new era of budget laptops — dictated by the Apple MacBook Neo and the Dell XPS 13 — versus the stratospheric prices Microsoft charged for the recent Surface Laptop and Pro for Business. It’s the “K-shaped” economy arriving for the PC.

Gaming laptops, of course, are on the upwardly-climbing slope of that “K,” as more companies design products that appeal to wealthier buyers with more disposable income. So why wouldn’t Microsoft jump at the chance to sell a product with a higher profit margin?

The answer, according to Ostrum, is that Microsoft doesn’t need to lead the laptop market in the same way as other laptop makers try to do. Microsoft has always tried to encourage the Windows ecosystem, and the Surface devices have been examples of what that ecosystem can do. It’s certainly been a point of criticism; Microsoft’s Surface devices have been left unchanged for generations, though the additions of the smaller Pro and Laptop and the addition of the Surface Laptop Ultra have introduced additional variation.

Still, Microsoft is content to let its partners take the lead.

“I say that about Surface not participating in every single solution out there, because we’ve lived in this space where we are attempting to lead the ecosystem, where the ecosystem is already doing well, or the ecosystem is well positioned — we don’t need to participate there,” Ostrum told me, as Microsoft launched consumer versions of the Surface Pro and Laptop with Snapdragon X2 Elite chips inside.

And yes, that includes gaming laptops.

“An example of that is for the past five or eight years the gaming space from a Windows laptop, in an ecosystem perspective, has been a healthy place. If Surface was looking for just growth, we could have added a device that was a laptop — a high-performance, gaming-focused, rainbow keyboards, lights and bells and whistles and all those things — but the ecosystem is healthy,” Ostrum said. “We don’t need to lead in that space, and so we have chosen not to.”

Hopefuls still have something left to chew on: Project Helix, which will play both console and PC games. Microsoft hasn’t said how Helix will work. Hypothetically, Helix could be a dedicated console but with a mouse or keyboard attached, or a revamp of Microsoft’s cloud-gaming initiative that would allow gamers to play traditional “PC” games like real-time-strategy games (RTS). It’s likely that Helix will steal from the Xbox ROG Ally handheld gaming PC, too. But as a traditional PC? Very unlikely.

It’s also worth noting that the upcoming Surface Laptop Ultra might be considered a gaming device too, with its powerful Nvidia RTX Spark GPU. It’s paired with an untested CPU from MediaTek, however, and Windows on Arm devices have had middling success, if that, in PC gaming.

Ostrum oversees Surface devices, so the Xbox division could still manufacture an Xbox gaming laptop, right? Maybe. Still, it’s all a pretty thin, speculative foundation for a question that Microsoft seems like it’s answered pretty definitively. A Surface-branded gaming PC isn’t going to happen.