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.
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.