Xbox started as the underdog, and while it didn’t hold a candle to PS2’s price and library… they at least brought some competition to the stagnating market after Sega’s departure. The Wii/360/PS3 era would have been so much worse without the 360.
and then when Microsoft stopped trying to compete and instead tried tying the brand to TV/Media/Windows, Sony and Nintendo seemed to collectively think that competition is pointless and the consumers must be wrung dry of any spare cash and ownership they could have.
If they really wanted the brand to turn around in an instant: Make Xbox Live service free. Offer a week-long game rental per month from a curated rotating list for every console owner. Get developers on their side by limiting predatory practices publishers are using. Start printing physical media with benefits like an included strategy guide, a poster, a map, or heck a sticker pack. Anything. Just get Xbox brand back in eyesight. It has to be tangible so that people can actually notice it while shopping instead of scrolling through a list on a storefront where it’d be missed.
But no- instead we have to talk about how there is a failure to monetize the brand. Boohoo, they can’t get even more money.
Hey fuckwit, maybe XBox division would be doing better if you hadn’t aggressively fucking enshitified it. Just saying.
Xbox has been my primary platform for most of my life. Parents didn’t like video games so I didn’t play much until I was an adult and secondhand stuff was really cheap and accessible.
After switching to Stadia, which was phenomenal for a casual-new-dad gamer and I loved it, before it was unsurprisingly killed, coming back was entirely different. Everything was digital, there is no secondhand market for games, and consoles are increasingly expensive.
Making Xbox less accessible and more restrictive may have pushed me to a windows PC a few years ago… But making Windows 11 such a shit show made me switch everything to Linux.
I’d love to stay but they seem determined to suck everything that was great out of it.
At this point, this is just the MS gaming pipeline.
Hilarious to hear Nadella whine about Xbox performance when he is directly responsible for it going to shit. 30% mandatory profit margins was a death sentence
Windows PC Master Race.
Until linux eclipses it, which its not far from doing. My gaming rig is the only windows device purely because of compatibility, but I’ll be moving platforms the moment linux gets like 95% compatibility
I find it ironic that PCMR was always really “Microsoft Master Race.”
They make 125 Billion a year in pure, uncut profit and are laying off people.
Srsly, some of us have been saying this for what seems like our whole lives, but fuck microsoft - gtfo. Mac, Linux, nothing - all are better than those fuckers.
If I’m Microsoft I’m saying fuck it, no more hardware, we suck at it, and I’d make a version of Windows optimized for the big screen that runs on any PC you want. Then beyond that, just become a publisher. They just simply are not good at making hardware.
XBOX hardware is fine. It’s what they’ve done with it that’s the problem.
The original Xbox was a powerhouse. I had so many CDs saved on that hard drive and it never even mentioned any storage restrictions. Shredding runs on Amped 2 woth my own music was so sick.
They were way ahead of the curve back then. They’ve just enshittified in the meantime.
Eh no?
Hardware is the only thing Microsoft remotely did well. Microsoft software has sucked donkey balls since the first basic they released and that wasn’t event theirs. Microsoft doesn’t know how to build good software, they never did
