Was the 2013 X1 reveal the beginning of the end for Xbox, in your opinion?

The Xbox 360 was a very respectable system, except for the whole RROD thing. But other than that, it had all of the great qualities of a great system; competitive library, best multiplat, great first party, great hardware features. Yet, MS decided to do a 180 and give gamers the Xbox One, which didn’t make any sense. They tried to force DRM, tried to make the console a TV box, gave us hand gestures nobody wanted lol. It was also weaker than the PS4, and cost $100 more (with the forced Kinect bundle). It feels like if they had just made a better Xbox 360, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad for Xbox. But here we are now, talking about MS going third party and Xbox losing its exclusives. What do you think, SW? Was the 2013 X1 reveal the beginning of the end for Xbox, in your opinion?

The end? But Xbox is still here. 😐

As we know it, at least.

🤭

I believe that when Xbox begins to lose its exclusives is the beginning of its end. Perhaps we will know for sure when Xbox actually cease to exist sometime in the future.

I wonder: if console exclusives go away in the future, will consoles follow the same path as well?

xbox is stll here and it still has a fanbase and support structure theres big time xbox guys out there ones here on the forum hyping gamepass

"The end" might be a bit premature, but I do agree with the overall sentiment. The reveal soured a lot of folks, and started a steady decline in console market share that MS was never able to turn around. Has forced them to rethink their strategy.

Nope the day they put Phil (the dill) Spencer as head of Xbox. I'm just surprised it's taken him over a decade to do it, can't even do that right, what an arseclown.

I'm pretty damn sure most of you guys/gals know what TC meant and "The End" part is not what it truly means mind you😅 Also to SolidGame, I think you should changed the thread title to something like "The Downfall of the Xbox brand" because that's the nature of the conversation you are going, not a means to an end. Just my humble opinion.

But anyway, Phil Spencer summed up that generation perfectly "we lost the worst possible generation to lose" and this was the generation that gave us Destiny, Fortnite, Call of Duty Warzone, etc. and people were turned off from the Xbox One from this press conference and either stuck with PlayStation 4 or defected Xbox brand. They've simply never recovered from this disastrous launch at all and Phil did everything he could at the time. And it was within that time they finally embrace supporting PC and that was a great thing he did and giving us "Xbox Play Anywhere" so kudos to him. But this still doesn't change the fact that Xbox One was weaker than PS4 during the 720p vs 1080p era and Sony fans just kept embarrassed Xbox fans and forced Kinect on making it pricier than PS4 was the final nail in the coffin IMO. By the way, this nice vid documentary is well worth the watch and I think SolidGame posted it here few years ago...I think he did: (E3 2013 was just a nightmare for Xbox brand)

@davillain: is there a major difference between the downfall of the Xbox brand versus the downfall of the Sega brand in the mid 1990s to where Sega exited the home console market after the Dreamcast?

One exited and the other hasn't. That would be my guess.

This one angered Xbox fans and Microsoft to this day

Wii U moment, cept they didn't have the Nintendo legacy to bounce back on

@onesiphorus: I'm sorry but what? What does Sega has anything to do with this thread?

Concord and Xbox studios being the biggest publisher with the most popular games on playstation....

...the begining of the end?

"The end" is somewhat hyperbolic, but it certainly put them on this path, haemorrhaging the market share they did against the PS4 absolutely put them in a position where they had to either write off their investment in gaming or double down and pivot to a new strategy because it was clear having the odd exclusive here and there wasn't going to cut it and the rise to prominence of the forever game meant convincing people to switch platforms just got that much harder, based on what MS did do (massive acquisitions focus on multiplatform etc.) I don't expect Xbox to disappear but I definitely don't see the console space going back to a 2007-esque landscape of genuine competitiveness.

Kinect was where I started to think, well what are we doing here? This isn't the same Microsoft from the beginning of the generwtion. They got drunk on Nintendo wii money, Sony did the same...

The Mattrick reveal was the worst day in Xbox history though. A massive gaff of a vision. One that we're all basically playing today. Lol.

Also, Microsoft may end up being extremely profitable after bowing out of consoles...

Well, no. It doesn't end as long as there's new Xboxes in stores.

As for what you probably mean, I don't care. I've never cared about Xbox and I don't care now. I don't care if the Xbox ends, I don't care if it continues, and if it does end, I don't care when you'd think it "began to end". Xbox is just completely unnecessary, it has zero uses for me. Caring about Xbox would be like caring about a tictac when you have a cake.

No. It was heavily wounded. But final nail was the purchase of ABK.

Beginning of the end for a console which is well into development for the next gen?

Aside from which people were excited about what they saw pre launch. The voice control, TV features, the Kinect demo with the boy by the river (Turned out to be fake😂) all were innovative features that peaked people’s interest.

That part made a lot of sense; Kinect 1 on 360 was the biggest selling peripheral out there, Wii was pulling in millions of casual gamers and plugging your cable box into your Xbox was designed to make things easier for people to consume their digital media, movies etc.

In the States it worked well initially, and sales were close but Europe wasn’t supported as well - Cortana and the media functions were only working with the English language. Japan has never gone for Xbox. Why would a European buy a more expensive, weaker console with features that weren’t fully supported at launch.

With time support was better, but it was too late.

Games were fine; Ryse looked better than anything on ps4 and still looks good - would love a sequel.

Sony just blew them away with marketing and deals - Call of duty marketing deal just ran out before MS bought Acti. The DRM stuff was poorly explained and Sony pounced on that, the price and above all the extra power that ps4 had. Heck I bought a ps4 solely for bf4 because it ran so much better and yes - gamers loved the ”for the players” attitude that Sony put out vs the family sitting around the tv image that x1 conjured up.

Ms suffered from bad marketing after the 360. The focus on getting the Xbox one in homes as a one stop box was right but they went way over board with it.

The end of Xbox since 2001?

Meanwhile, Xbox couldn't be doing better. lol :P

Indeed, the title says "beginning of the end", not the end. Meaning, a turning point that put Xbox on its current trajectory. And yes, while it's technically still in business, it had a terrible 2024. MS will never officially confirm the numbers, but 2.7 million units is what is floated out here.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/xbox-sales-hit-rock-bottom-after-historic-2024-decline.1680872/

@SolidGame_basic: You should tag the one's who said "The End" part, not directly at me. The Beginning of the end makes sense.

You two almost look like twins. ;o

lol :P

@SecretPolice: Call me Orphan. I have no family...not even a twin😁

With everybody onboard at the 3 trillion-dollar behemoth known as MS, Xbox is thriving not dying. ;o

Sorry TC, nuttin but the fax mam. lol :P

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-ceo-stresses-that-gaming-is-critical-to-the-company/1100-6529610/

Microsoft CEO Stresses That Gaming Is Critical To The Company

"You can't be a gaming publisher without, sort of, first and foremost being focused on that."

A recent report said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was at one point mulling the possibility of shuttering the Xbox division. Before this, Microsoft's own co-founder Paul Allen's investment company called for Microsoft to dump Xbox and spin it off as a separate business. That never happened, and now Nadella is speaking up to express Microsoft's commitment to gaming. He told Dwarkesh Patel that it's not true that Microsoft's investments in gaming is part of some kind of "means to some other end."

Microsoft has a long history of supporting gaming, Nadella pointed out, referencing how Microsoft Flight Simulator was a Microsoft product before the company even made the first version of Windows.

"So, gaming has got a long history at the company, and we want to be in gaming for gaming's sake. I always start by saying I hate to be in businesses where they're means to some other end. They have to be ends unto themselves," he said.

Nadella's comments came in response to a question about if Nadella had some kind of "premonition" about how gaming could help contribute to Microsoft's push into the artificial intelligence space by using games to train its models.

"We are a company where we have to bring all these assets together and be better owners by adding value. For example, cloud gaming is a natural thing for us to invest in because that will just expand the TAM [Total Addressable Market] and expand the ability for people to play games everywhere," he said.

Nadella went on to say that Microsoft's new investments into gaming-focused AI with its Muse technology can be helpful to allow Microsoft's game team to make games faster and more efficiently.

"As the biggest, world's largest publisher, this will be helpful. But at the same time, we've got to produce great-quality games. I mean, you can't be a gaming publisher without, sort of, first and foremost being focused on that," he said.

Microsoft's new Muse technology is what the company claims is the world's first "world and human action model" that is trained right now on Ninja Theory's abandoned game Bleeding Edge. Ninja Theory has said Muse won't be use to make games, but instead to help empower humans to work faster.

"I think about gaming data as perhaps, you know, what YouTube is perhaps to Google, gaming data is to Microsoft. And so therefore I'm excited about that," Nadella said.

AI is a controversial technology within the gaming space and across numerous other businesses. A recent GDC study found that the majority of game studios worldwide use generative AI already, despite concerns about the technology. Microsoft itself has gone on record saying advancements to AI will lead to job losses in the short term but may lead to more opportunities in the long term. Microsoft laid off more than 2,500 people in the past year in gaming roles, though whether or not the reduction had anything to do with AI is unknown. Video game voice actors have also gone on strike due to concerns about AI.

Xbox is still going strong.

I wouldn't have batted an eye a few years ago as a PC gamer. Now I, and many of my friends are gamepass subscribers.

I really do wonder if all this doom and gloom helps cows sleep easier at night. I mean it must, as all they do is make threads about Xbox, never about Playstation exclusives.

Oh wait... Playstation has no games.

lol :P

@SecretPolice said:

@R4gn4r0k said:

Xbox is still going strong.

I wouldn't have batted an eye a few years ago as a PC gamer. Now I, and many of my friends are gamepass subscribers.

I really do wonder if all this doom and gloom helps cows sleep easier at night. I mean it must, as all they do is make threads about Xbox, never about Playstation exclusives.

Oh wait... Playstation has no games.

lol :P

Just wait is back.

Just wait 2.0

Just wait for the next Sony state of play, and the next, and the next

@R4gn4r0k said:

@SecretPolice said:

@R4gn4r0k said:

Xbox is still going strong.

I wouldn't have batted an eye a few years ago as a PC gamer. Now I, and many of my friends are gamepass subscribers.

I really do wonder if all this doom and gloom helps cows sleep easier at night. I mean it must, as all they do is make threads about Xbox, never about Playstation exclusives.

Oh wait... Playstation has no games.

lol :P

Just wait is back.

Just wait 2.0

Just wait for the next Sony state of play, and the next, and the next

Just wait for Xbox to throw them some of our overflow of games.

lol :P

Right?

My series X still works and with gamepass its my preferred choice to play on.

I'm with Eroica - i think chasing the Wii was what led them down the wrong path. The reveal of the XB1 was like a gunshot wound and they've been limping along ever since.

Might've turned it around somewhat but none of their new games really caught on while both Halo and Gears faltered.

My local Target no longer sells Xbox Games or Consoles.....

so it's not looking good

@SolidGame_basic: What end? MS makes a ton of money with the Xbox brand.

How many times do they have to say they are not exiting the console market?

You cows are an embarrassment to this forum - and that's saying a lot.

As a competitive force in the hardware space.....yeah they never really recovered. All the momentum from the 360 was just wiped out.

It's probably not the worst console reveal of all time. The wiiu takes that crown really (At least people knew the X1 was a new system). But really bad. That was also the year that Sony announced that PS online gaming would be behind a paywall...but the fallout from the Xbox conference was so bad that the announcement was glossed over.

I think there was also a scandal (not related to Xbox) around web cams around the time of the reveal: so when people learned about the mandetory kinect, and that it's a camera....uff. Really unfortunate timing. Then the whole online requirement and the doubling down from MS....really just dug their own hole.

Some credit does go to Sony for their success that gen too of course. Difficult lessons learned from the PS3 disaster. They got the hardware and price spot on at launch. It was more powerful and cheaper at launch I think (or that was the plan but MS took kinect out at the last minute? Memory is a bit fuzzy now).

We would be looking at a different MS in the gaming space had that gen gone differently.

No one would care if they released more games worth playing.

The issue is the big three for Xbox ran stale and Microsoft double downed on them stubbornly even though times and trends came and went. Forza was the only one still staying strong.

For the rest of the first party, Microsoft was honestly just dealt a bad hand with ok, mid and bad games. Killer Instinct, Sunset Overdrive, and Sea of Thieve are three good games. Probably a few more worth mentioning. It's just wasn't enough when compared to the competition.

It always comes down to games and how many they can offer, the quality, and the variety.

I mean, Sony did this one cool thing during the 8th gen and that was...releasing good games.

The only and I mean only Xbox One exclusive I really enjoy is Rare Replay. Quantum Break was mediocre at best and hardly the best Remedy games. I always say that MS took the Xbox 360 fans for granted and paid the price.

Not the end for Xbox, but for system wars perhaps.

The winner as always, is PC gamers. we get all the Xbox stuff day 1 and through gamepass, Playstation "exclusives" a year or two later, and Nintendo stuff through emulation. plus the best and most flexible options for hardware as always.

incredible. peace at last.

Likewise. Unless Gamepass goes to PS, I will continue to buy Xbox consoles.

Yeah, I also see Xbox One vs. PS4 as a parody of Sega Saturn vs. PS1 in the 90s, from the $100 difference at launch, to the weaker third-party support, to Sony's exclusive deal with FF7 (lol).

Another analogy could be their respective flagships, Sonic and Halo. Sonic was a huge hit on the Genesis/Mega Drive, but couldn't keep up the momentum on the Saturn. It was revived with Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast, but not enough to win back the audience that had migrated to the PS platform. This is similar to how Halo went from being a huge hit on the 360 to the doldrums on the Xbox One to Halo Infinite on the S/X series.

I'm also curious to see if MS's last and biggest AAA for this gen, Fable, will be similar to Sega's Shenmue for the Dreamcast. MS is reportedly overambitious with Fable and has spent so much money and time on it that it will be hard to recoup like Sega did with Shenmue. I hope it will be at least as innovative and influential as Shenmue back then, but I doubt it, haha.