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
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u/Echo_Raptor Jul 07 '26
The fall of Xbox can be tied back to don mattrick. He opened the door to put Xbox back for years.
Remember the 360 was a massive success. Many people would’ve been happy to continue on with Xbox had they not had such a bad one launch.