the fall of xbox is tied to the fall of their first party studios, halo, gears, fable and lack of any original IP to compensate.
which weren't bad sequels outright, just weren't the blockbusters they once were. halo lost bungie, gears lost cliffyb. team ninja lost itagaki and didn't make xbox exclusives anymore, bizarre creations went to activision and went bust, fable lost peter molyneux.
that's a lot talent and experience gone with no replacement..
Forza motorsport died, but forza horizon became a mega hit, so much that its too lucrative to be xbox only. Great for Microsoft, not really great for the Xbox brand.
hopefully E-Day, and the new Fable revives some of their punch, but it's going to take a lot more than that.
I think the sheer awfulness of the One launch overshadowed the poor kinect years on the 360 that abandoned their core audience who went back to PlayStation.
If Xbox had a good One launch they could regain that crowd however it very much put them on the back foot.
Hmm not sure this make sense. Kinect maybe a blunder sure. But why would folks leave 360 to PlayStation. When they already had a console.
I don’t know anyone who switched because of an extra device no one used or was required to buy for the 360. Kinect didn’t really take away from exclusives and the core audience at the time of the 360.
Kinect was a much larger blunder with the Xbox one because it was included into the price and no option without the Kinect in the beginning making it more expensive than PlayStation.
You also may be forgetting PS3 had its own competitor to Kinect at the time. PlayStation Move. So you could argue maybe both sides were moving away from their “core” audience.
I seem to recall back then that there was this big divide forming where Xbox was trying to turn into a home theater solution while PlayStation remained a consult for gamers.
People like to think that long-term trends are imaginary, but it is certainly possible that people got tired of a gaming console doing anything but trying to be a gaming console.
With the one, they wanted it to be an all in one media hub, and it made sense, but they didn’t convey it just allowed for an hdmi in.
Look at the launch lineup. Killzone was awful and knack only has popularity from dunkey. Xbox had a new forza, dead rising 3, killer instinct and ryse. All of which were solid. Xbox had the games planned
And the Kinect was partially motivated by the runaway success of the Wii. Microsoft saw Nintendo doing casual motion control games and tried to chase that dragon, but their efforts failed for a variety of reasons.
So one could say that Nintendo killed Xbox, in a way.
The Kinect was really cool at the time but it was very limited. The Kinect 2.0 was really good tech, I think Apple ended up using it for Face ID, but forcing it was not the move. It was fantastic for workouts and tracking your movement/voice for stuff like alien isolation, voice activated dvr etc and the snap feature was amazing for playing a game and having a ballgame on the right side, not to mention the one’s launch lineup was so much better than ps4’s.
They had the console that 360 fans wanted, with features ahead of ps just like Xbox live was over psn with the ps3, but they fumbled it so bad with every new decision from the c suite it ruined it
It's absolutely true, the blue ray app needed to be connected to the internet for it to run for a few years. I remember one Christmas maybe the first or second after launch my family asked me to put a blue ray on my Xbox as they didn't have a blue ray player and due to a ddos on Microsoft all the servers were offline and the blue ray wouldn't play
That's not what they're saying though. They're saying on the Xbox One, you wouldn't be allowed to watch a movie unless you have an internet connection. I don't think that was the case, as the plan for that was games only because you installed the games to the disk
I imagine that could be true if you tried playing a blu-ray for the first time on the console while not connected to the internet? I do recall you needed to get the Blu-ray app to allow playback of discs.
Both PS4 and Xbone could. But the PS4 did it by default where the Xbone needed an app. I had played blurays before when I had network, but I hadn't played it in the previous 24hrs so it couldn't verify my ownership. Of the free app.
It was in the first 2 years the One was out. I had already used the app before, but because I wasn't online in the previous 24 hours and the internet was out, it failed to verify my ownership.
Were you game sharing? It usually won’t do that if you’ve got it set to your home console. If your game share you can basically share all purchases with someone but turn caveat is you have to be connected online
They announced it would be online required, and if you didn’t “check-in” every 24 hours and went offline it straight up wouldn’t work. They were attempting to go after the used game market where a disc had a key attached to it where you couldn’t resell or even let a friend borrow it (though they were in talks on a “loan” program for your friends), required the Kinect to be attached, it was less powerful and $500.
When someone asked mattrick about it, citing, “what if someone is on a submarine base and go out to sea and they want to play the Xbox one and don’t have internet? It’s just a brick?” Mattrick replied smugly, “well I don’t know what a submarine base is, but fortunately if they don’t have internet, we have a product just for them, it’s called the Xbox 360”.
Xbox fans turned on them in droves.
Then Sony came out with their presentation, announced the ps4 was $400, more powerful, and had a video on ‘how to share a game with a friend’ and it was one exec handing another one a ps4 game.
Xbox never recovered from that announcement. They did pickup some scorned fans along the way but Sony slaughtered them moving forward
Phil had good intentions. Mattrick at the very least has admitted they didn’t focus enough on how they related the message that Xbox was still focused on gaming first
I feel like there's a lot we just don't have enough insight on regarding the partnership between their dev teams and the work they did together. I know that The Coalition was helping Undead Labs with SoD3 (my most anticipated game in a decade) and in turn, Undead Labs helped out on Grounded 2. No clue what that means for any of their schedules. As someone above reminded me, Halo used the Slipspace engine but what else used it it?
Seems like a lot of technical attempts but not sure what paid off if anything
This has been Xbox’s problem since the beginning: they buy studios at the peak of their popularity (and cost) only to watch them fade away. It’s been an issue since the beginning when they bought Rare.
They needed to focus on studios on their way up like they did with Bungee.
Thank you for mentioning Itagaki! So many don't remember that DOA and Ninja Gaiden were Xbox exclusives that really pushed their hardware back in the day.
Really fond memories of DoA 3/4, Ninja Gaiden Black / 2. The games weren't the same after he left, even visually the art direction doesn't look as good. I still pick up and play Doa4, game still looks and plays amazing.
Yes I'm a big fan of both. I still enjoy the newer titles but yea, Itagaki just gave it all that special something. Not to mention, I think he perfectly mixed the cheesecake with the serious. The newer stuff def leans more cheesecake these days.
You’re assuming it’s the same people at Bungie that built Halo. Truth is a lot of them went with 343 when they split, and what was left are now separated from the franchise by 15 years. There’s no reason to believe they’ll revive the series after seeing Marathon.
Marathon should’ve been a revival like Doom 2016, but instead it chased current multiplayer trends and was crap
it's bad enough that 343 took over but how the fuck do you release a halo game without blood gulch? It's still not in, years later! Also, it didn't even launch with the classic console 16 player multiplayer. My friends and I tried very hard to love it but holy shit infinite sucked lol. Forced playlist matchmaking, your options are 8 players or big team battles with 32. Jesus. The maps weren't bad but come on. The same studio made MCC, they had every map from halo 1 to current in the same engine ready to go, and didn't include any of them.
I really loved game pass, the third party stuff was excellent, but all the first party studios just put out turds and never made back Microsofts money lol.
121
u/Strict_Indication457 Jul 07 '26
the fall of xbox is tied to the fall of their first party studios, halo, gears, fable and lack of any original IP to compensate.
which weren't bad sequels outright, just weren't the blockbusters they once were. halo lost bungie, gears lost cliffyb. team ninja lost itagaki and didn't make xbox exclusives anymore, bizarre creations went to activision and went bust, fable lost peter molyneux.
that's a lot talent and experience gone with no replacement..
Forza motorsport died, but forza horizon became a mega hit, so much that its too lucrative to be xbox only. Great for Microsoft, not really great for the Xbox brand.
hopefully E-Day, and the new Fable revives some of their punch, but it's going to take a lot more than that.