After 24 years of wasted potential the Xbox dream is finally dead
So it's finally over. After nearly a quarter of a century, Xbox has finally reached the point of no return. It may continue as a brand, a third party publisher like EA or Ubisoft, but the idea of Xbox being a console manufacturer on par with Sony and Nintendo is deader than the dinosaurs. Although in hindsight, Microsoft was never really a contender.
I am saying this as someone that has owned an Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. I sold the last one after a year, once I realised I'd backed the wrong horse, so I'm not going to pretend that after this week I'll never buy Xbox again, because I never was going to anyway. But now I feel better about my decision, especially if it doesn't put any money in the pockets of Phil Spencer and co.
I'm not going to gloat over the fallout from the layoffs this week, especially as Spencer has still got his job, but it really is shocking how badly Microsoft has handled this and how, after all this time in the business, they don't really seem to have learned anything. Apart from a five-year period in the mid-2000s the whole brand has been nothing but an abject failure.
The first Xbox was released late in the sixth generation of consoles and in some ways could be regarded as the most successful one, since it's the only Xbox that didn't come last in its generation – beating the GameCube by a few million. Both were miles behind the PlayStation 2 though, so Microsoft quickly dropped support for the console and rushed to get the Xbox 360 out early.
This sort of worked, because it meant the Xbox 360 had a year head start on the PlayStation 3. More importantly, it had some really important new ideas. After the Xbox started to push online play and Halo became its biggest hit, Xbox already had a big point of difference with PlayStation. The PlayStation 2 didn't have a built-in modem or any real online capability, until Sony was pushed to start experimenting with it because of Microsoft's success.
The Xbox 360 took full advantage of that and not only put online play front and centre, it introduced the concept of digital downloads and indie games on a console, as well as achievements. The Xbox 360 was new and innovative, whereas the PlayStation 3 was late, overly expensive, and with no interesting exclusives.
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Xbox 360 not only had Halo but also Gears Of War, Fable and things like Oblivion and Mass Effect, which were originally Xbox exclusives. It was the lead format for all games that generation, or at least the first half of it.
The problem with the Xbox 360 is that its golden age really was just five years. It was in the same generation as the Wii and Microsoft couldn't resist trying to copy it, but with 'better' technology. They released Kinect in 2010 and that was the beginning of the end.
Kinect never worked properly, it never had any decent games, and yet Microsoft became so obsessed with it they bundled it in with the Xbox One and made the console stupidly expensive, underpowered, and focused on TV more than games. It was, of course, a disaster.
The problem was, so was the Xbox 360 really. Thanks to rushing it out early the red ring of death cost Microsoft over a billion dollars to fix and at the end of the generation they were still beaten by the Wii and PlayStation 3 anyway. The Xbox One was beaten by the PlayStation 4 and Switch (but hey, it beat the Wii U!), and the Xbox Series X/S has, again, been beaten by everything.
Not that sales are any sign of whether something Is good or not, but it helps put into perspective how Xbox has never been a true challenger. They've only ever been big in America and the UK and that soon started to change with the Xbox One.
What also changed at that time is Phil Spencer taking over. Just as a reminder, that's 11 years ago now and what is the legacy of his time in charge? Two failed consoles and no improvement in first party output, except for from Activision Blizzard and Bethesda, which he spent billions buying.
He didn't seem to realise that came with strings attached and within months Microsoft was pushing for Xbox to go multiformat and increasingly not bothering to promote the console, as sales tanked. Almost every month now, more and more of what made Xbox a console manufacturer is chipped away, and it seems obvious that all we're going to be left with is Activision Blizzard and Bethesda – companies that were already perfectly fine on their own, until Microsoft bought them.
The only way is down from here on in and laying off 4,000-odd staff, and cancelling a bunch of games, seems the obvious place to draw a line under it all. Not only because of that but because almost half the 9,100 job cuts at Microsoft his week were at Xbox. The company obviously has it in for gaming and no matter how many gaming T-shirts its execs wear the pretence that anyone at Xbox cares about gaming is impossible to believe now. More Trending
Xbox had it all: a successful, innovative console and the backing of the world's richest company. But it frittered all that away in just a few years, to the point were, in hindsight, it's been running on fumes for the past decade. I wish I could say otherwise but Xbox is dead and in truth it was barely ever alive in the first place.
By reader Ashton Marley
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Looking like a teetering stack of washing machines perched on the edge of an elevated highway, the Nakagin Capsule Tower was an astonishing arrival on the Tokyo skyline in 1972. It was the heady vision of Kisho Kurokawa, a radical Japanese architect who imagined a high-rise world of compact capsules, where people could cocoon themselves away from the information overload of the modern age. These tiny pods would be 'a place of rest to recover', he wrote, as well as 'an information base to develop ideas, and a home for urban dwellers'. Residents could peer out at the city from their cosy built-in beds through a single porthole window, or shut it all out by unfurling an elegant circular fan-like blind, all while remaining connected with the latest technology at all times. Launched to critical acclaim, the Nakagin tower's 140 capsules quickly sold out, and became highly sought after by well-heeled salarymen looking for a place to crash when they missed the last train home. 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