It’s funny watching console gamers mourn the “death” of Xbox.
I was a diehard fan of the original Xbox and 360. But to me, Xbox actually died back in December 2012—the day Valve launched Big Picture mode. That’s when every PC suddenly became a console.
The only reason I ever bought an Xbox in the first place was because it brought PC gaming into the living room. The original Xbox was basically a stripped-down PC with a custom OS—and I loved it for that. Finally, I had PC-grade performance on my TV.
But let’s be real: Valve ate Microsoft’s lunch. And with the Steam Deck, they came back for seconds.
The good news? Microsoft finally seems to understand that Valve—not Sony—is their real competition. And now they’re answering with the Xbox handheld.
About time.
Valve really operates in a different market from Microsoft or Sony, but what hurt them was a couple of things:
Repeatedly skipping Gamescom essentially told Sony “Yeah, we don’t care about Europe.” And the sales numbers show it. Sony owns Europe.
No differential between console and PC. Launching the same game at the same time on PC and Xbox doesn’t incentivize people to a) buy games on Xbox or b) develop games on Xbox. Why bother if it’s on PC the same day?
Focusing on digital vs. physical takes games out of stores. On a recent trip to Target they had a nice big Playstation section and a nice big Switch section. Hey? Where are the Xbox games?
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/target-not-selling-physical-xbox-games-anymore.1679241/
Re 2, I was and am angry about how MS handled the Xbox exclusives. They spent the 90s making games for the pc that were great, and then the Xbox drops and the pc market is ignored for years. “just buy the console” makes no sense when I have a far superior machine right here, and when multi-player is behind a subscription. I was gifted an Xbox a few years after launch, along with Midtown Madness 3, the only game I wanted - and never gave MS a cent of my own money. I stayed on Halo 1 for years, then when Halo 2 finally dropped for the pc, I got it and enjoyed my first playthrough on my computer. My first playthrough of H3, ODST, and 4 weren’t until the MCC dropped on steam. I got Forza bundled with the Xbox, but it wasn’t until Horizon 3 released on pc that I got into it.
I fucking despise the 15-year window where MS just abandoned their loyal customers on pc to milk people with their inferior box and subscription bullshit. The smartest move they have made was re-embrace the pc as a customer base. And 8 year-old me could have told those moronic C-suites in 2001. They isolated a core customer base for short-term profits, and they have earned nothing but resentment for it.
The Xbox should have always been a product for “I don’t understand computers, but I want to play games”, while the pc should have remained a “I know what I’m doing, and I don’t need a walled garden”. MS fucked up massively, and lost out on revenue trying to force their hand for a decade+. The fact that they release on both is nothing but positive, as they get customers from both camps, and they finally are undoing a bit of the hate and resentment they caused.
Crazy saying that Valve doesn’t operate in the same spot as Microsoft when Microsoft makes Windows.
Personally, I was never interested in Xbox as a PlayStation killer. Its entire appeal was that it was a consolized PC.
Then Valve went ahead and made all PCs into consoles.
Speaking of consoles here.
Yeah, and what I’m saying is that the original appeal of Xbox was that it brought a PC gaming experience to the living room.
Stuff like hard drives and online multiplayer, that was a PC thing.
Games like Halo, MechWarrior, and Fable—they were more culturally a PC thing. Then Microsoft made it a console thing.
In my opinion, what killed Xbox as a console is that PC gamers no longer felt a need to “go console”. And the only customers left for Xbox were dyed-in-the-wool console gamers.
Which you can’t really build a business off of since even in the best case scenario, consoles sell only 150M units per generation.
The Xbox One should have been a Windows box in a console shell.
I kinda had the opposite experience, I had been a PC gamer for years before the Xbox came out, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Aliens Total Conversion, Hexen, Rise of the Triad, Quake, Unreal…
By then I had kind of burned out on FPS, so when I heard about Halo I was like “I dunno… another FPS…”
Then I played a demo in the store and was like “Shut up and take my money!”
Well, Halo is an interesting story because that was supposed to be a killer game for the Mac.
I owned a Mac at the time and I was very salty that Microsoft bought Bungie, then made it the system seller for the Xbox.
But I loved Bungie so much that I was willing to make a deal with the devil just to play Halo.