Well, it looks like the rumors were correct! During the Xbox broadcast portion of Gamescom 2025, Xbox officially announced that the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Ally X will be launching on October 16th, 2025, just in time for the spooky season and the following holidays!
First revealed earlier this year at the Xbox Games Showcase, these devices are ushering Xbox gaming into their handheld era, and we couldn’t be more excited for the ability to take our favorite games on the go! With access to Xbox, Battle.net, and other leading PC storefronts all from one mobile device, enjoying a seamless gaming experience has never been so streamlined.
On October 16, 2025, the Xbox Ally handhelds will be available in: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, China (Xbox Ally X only), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam.
Availability will follow for other markets where ROG Ally series products are currently sold, including Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and China, the Xbox Ally will launch early next year. The pricing and pre-order availability will be made public in the coming weeks. In addition, Xbox also announced the Handheld Compatibility Program. This is a new initiative that’s been specifically designed to make a larger library of games playable and fully supported on handheld. At launch, players will be able to see handheld compatibility directly in their personal game library under badges represented by “Handheld Optimized” or “Mostly Compatible”.
By working with game studios to test, optimize, and verify thousands of games for handheld compatibility, players will be able to dive into their top titles without having to change any settings for the most part, with only simple tweaks for specific games to get that peak performance each player prefers. Games will also feature a Windows Performance Fit indicator to represent their expected performance on their supported device. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the talented engineers behind these revolutionary devices have thought of just about everything!
Xbox is continuing to develop new features to elevate the user experience with their upcoming handhelds, more specifically the Advanced Shader Delivery that will preload game shaders during download, so select games will launch up to 10x faster, run smoother, and use less battery during the first gaming session. Along with that come a host of AI-powered features that will be rolling out early next year for the ROG Xbox Ally X to enhance the player experience.
One of the most exciting is the Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR), which is a system-level feature that uses the power of the NPU to upscale games running at lower resolutions, delivering high-resolution visuals and smooth framerates across a wide range of games, with no additional changes required from game developers, which I’m sure the devs are as thrilled about it as we players are.
Also Highlight Reels will allow for AI to capture your standout gameplay moments like epic boss battles or hard-fought victories and generates short replay clips for you to share with friends or on your favorite social channels. It’s like a much fancier modern version of what the Xbox One used to do early on.
Players can also check out the ROG Raikiri II Xbox Wireless Controller, created by Asus through their Designed for Xbox program, that features a 1000Hz polling rate in PC mode, anti-drift TMR joysticks, and dual-mode triggers. It sounds pretty awesome if you’re asking me, and frankly, I’m excited for all of it!
For more information about the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, check out the Xbox Wire post here and check out our previous coverage on compatibility.
