Tag Archives: Xbox

IKEA and Xbox’s YXSTABY furniture collection makes gaming feel more at home

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Gaming furniture often announces its purpose a little too loudly with oversized chairs and brightly colored accents. This can make a living room feel more like a dedicated gaming den if you are not someone who wants one. IKEA and Xbox take a different approach with YXSTABY, a nine-piece collection designed to make gaming fit more naturally into everyday spaces.

Unveiled at Gamescom in Cologne on August 26, the collection resonates with how practical gaming actually happens at home. It can span across living rooms, bedrooms, dining tables, and shared spaces rather than in a dedicated room. IKEA and Xbox developed every piece together, pairing IKEA’s experience in home furnishings with Xbox’s understanding of how people actually play. The teams also visited homes to understand the practical challenges of fitting gaming into everyday routines.

Designer: IKEA and Xbox

The result is furniture that addresses the less glamorous parts of gaming, particularly where to put controllers, cables, screens, and other hardware when they are not being used. The mobile TV stand, for example, can be rolled to wherever gaming is happening and includes storage at the back. Once the session is over, it can simply be moved aside. A toolbox provides another compact solution for homes without a permanent gaming setup. It keeps controllers, cables, and hardware together, while its lid doubles as a laptop stand. That means a dining table can transition from a gaming surface back into an everyday workspace without leaving equipment scattered across it.

The rolling side table similarly provides a dedicated place for controllers, with charging space hidden behind sliding doors. Some of YXSTABY’s most interesting ideas come directly from the Xbox controller. The collection includes a D-pad-inspired cushion and a stainless-steel platter, while a mirrored display box turns controllers, figurines, and other collectibles into objects worth displaying.

The most playful interpretation is the thumbstick stool. Developed using the original 3D design files from Xbox’s device designers, the stool translates the familiar controller thumbstick into a piece of furniture. Its rounded base allows it to tilt and move with the user, while its textured surface echoes the grip pattern of the original controller. Despite these references, YXSTABY avoids looking like conventional gaming merchandise. Muted white, black, and beige tones give the collection a Scandinavian character, while green is used selectively around storage pockets, compartments, and other functional details. The intention is for the furniture to sit comfortably alongside existing interiors rather than dominate them.

There are also subtler details for Xbox fans to discover. The name YXSTABY itself references the controller’s X, Y, A, and B buttons, while symbols, puzzles, and game-related elements are incorporated into various pieces. YXSTABY will be available through IKEA stores and online from October 1, although availability may vary by market.

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Backbone’s iPhone Gaming Controller Goes Translucent for Xbox’s 25th Anniversary

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Remember when you could see inside your Game Boy? Or your iMac? Or basically every piece of tech your parents told you was “too expensive to touch”? The early 2000s were absolutely obsessed with showing you the guts of things, and honestly, it ruled. Backbone apparently remembers too, because the new Xbox 25th Anniversary Edition of their Pro controller just raided the Controller S color archive and came back with three translucent shells that smell like 2002 in the best possible way.

Crystal Clear, Iconic Blue, and Bold Orange. Those aren’t made-up retro-adjacent names. Those are the actual original Xbox Controller S colorways, pulled straight from Microsoft’s retail catalog from back when controllers felt like objects worth bragging about. Backbone did their homework, and it shows.

Designer: Backbone

The Iconic Blue and Bold Orange units aren’t fully see-through. The grip bellies have a frosted, almost cloudy quality, and the plastic deepens where two layers of shell overlap, creating a subsurface glow effect that’s half-accidental, half-beautiful. The Bold Orange, particularly, looks backlit in direct light, the kind of amber warmth you’d get through sea glass. Crystal Clear is a different proposition entirely: genuinely transparent, every internal rib and screw boss visible, the trigger mechanism readable through the shell. Three colorways, three completely different personalities, all from the same tooling.

Every surface your hands actually contact is solid black. The thumbstick caps, the D-pad, the face buttons, the rear paddles, the trigger tips. Opaque, grounded, present. Everything else goes translucent and pulls back visually. It’s a simple call that makes the controller feel intentional rather than just see-through for novelty’s sake, your hands know exactly where to land, and the shell gets to be the art. The one exception is the Backbone button, which stays orange across all three colorways. On Bold Orange it vanishes completely into the shell; on Crystal Clear and Iconic Blue it’s a single warm accent, doing all the color work by itself.

The bridge connecting the two grips carries a fine perforated dot-matrix texture, the “BACKBONE” and “XBOX 25” co-branding, and a miniature Xbox sphere in place of the O. That whole wordmark sits on the one surface that disappears the second you dock a phone. Permanent branding, placed where only you see it. There’s something genuinely charming about that.

Hardware-wise this is the full Backbone Pro package underneath the anniversary paint: full-size ALPS thumbsticks, Hall Effect triggers, two remappable rear paddles, ultra-quiet face buttons, Bluetooth LE with FlowState one-press device switching, and dual batteries rated to 40 hours. USB-C wired or fully wireless, works across phones, tablets, PCs and TVs. The whole thing sits under 200 grams. No changes from the base Pro, which is absolutely fine when the base Pro is already regarded as the best thing you can strap to a phone for serious gaming.

The Backbone Pro Xbox 25th Anniversary Edition is $159.99, preorders are open now, and shipping kicks off in October 2026. It comes with a free month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and one gentle warning: it’s sold as a blind box, so the universe picks your color. All three are in equal production, all three look great, and the orange is objectively the most dramatic. Pick accordingly, or just roll the dice.

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