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.
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Microsoft will be a publisher only. The problem with XBOX circa 2010 onward is they followed every trend and abandoned it.
It’s not Valve/Steam killing Xbox. Microsoft is killing Xbox.
I feel like Microsoft was their own enemy. They kept slicing off small portions of their market in pursuit of vendor lock-in. Now there is nobody left supporting them.
They ran off even their most loyal players one by one with their asinine moves. Lame games, vendor lockin, nickle and dining.
I was die hard for Xbox. Had every one, dozens of games, more probably. Have fond memories of lan parties and friends coming over to play split screen. I remember playing through halo 3 the night it dropped into the early morning, and getting the beta from Reach.
Then they killed off split screen. And lan gaming. You had to use Xbox live to play with your friend in the room. Oh no they don’t have Xbox live. Oh no there’s an update. Now they don’t have their password. They can’t join my party. The audio doesn’t work. It became a hassle to play with people
Steam just works. And it’s a fair price
Who even uses steam big picture?
In my experience it has always had an horrible experience.
Also pc gaming has always been a thing.
It’s just that consoles have been harder to justify not only because pc gaming have gotten better. But because consoles have gotten worse. It’s no longer plug and play, now you have to do the same steps of installing, downloading things, checking if your version of the console can run that game… At that point big consoles are harder and harder to justify.
Sony will go behind of they don’t do some changes. Xbox fell sooner because they had a thinner base. But sony is not out of danger.
Nintendo is probably fine as they rotated to handhelds, which are a different niche than normal pcs. And because they hold massive exclusive IPs.
been using Big Picture for years. it’s a better experience than the ad-riddled UIs of the xbox and playstation.
I use Steam Big Picture.
Specifically, I have a desktop PC, with an RTX 3090, hooked up to my TV.
Now I don’t recommend doing it this way anymore. It’s probably better to buy something like a Legion Go, hook it up to an eGPU, while you dock it to a TV.
But probably your bigger question is, “Why do I use Steam Big Picture?”
Because I specifically want to play PC games on my TV. Half my Steam library natively supports gamepad. And of those that don’t, I can easily adapt keyboard controls to a gamepad—if community-built options have not yet been made.
Truly, Steam is what Xbox should have been.
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Pretty sure Big Picture uses the exact same interface as the steam deck nowadays, which is a much better experience than the old thing. At least when I stream through Moonlight, I haven’t manually launched big picture in years.
When was the last time you used Big Picture? I have a micro ITX build hooked up to my TV running Bazzite desktop, and have Big Picture loading at boot.
It’s a console. And it’s fantastic. It also lets me mod it so I can make it look like a Wii U if I wanted.
Last year. It still had a lot of lag moving around in my machine.
Consoles live and die by their exclusives. Xbox hasn’t had the draw that Sony and Nintendo have.
Gamepass is still a good deal, but I wouldn’t buy a console for it.
Valve really operates in a different market from Microsoft or Sony, but what hurt them was a couple of things:
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Repeatedly skipping Gamescom essentially told Sony “Yeah, we don’t care about Europe.” And the sales numbers show it. Sony owns Europe.
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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?
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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.
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