Anyone in the videogame zeitgeist can tell you why Xbox lost the console wars. It was not because Playstation was a trustworthy company and it was not because any exclusive game for another console. Microsoft did it to themselves and they are still feeling the stranglehold of that failure years after the eighth generation had come and gone. From the day that it was announced, the Xbox One uncovered just how bad a game console could get even before it was released in 2013. It also showed gamers just how much control they could have over their gaming experience and it was a very disconcerting revelation that made the general public stop trusting Microsoft.
This all began in April of 2013 when a Microsoft Studios employee, Adam Orth, confirmed people's dreadful rumor of the next generation console requiring to be always online. He posted on his Twitter account that a console always being online was not a big deal and that people just needed to accept it. This was the first very large nail in Xbox One's console and opened up an entire flooding of negative press and public backlash. He lost his job soon after making the comment, but this was only the beginning of a very long and dreadful launch of a machine that was now in question.
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| Adam Orth |
The following months only brought more news and more disbelief. It seemed like every single thing that Microsoft revealed about the Xbox One only drew more backlash and public hatred. They announced that this console was not going to focus on gaming and that it was more about being a replacement to your computer and your television. Rather than giving people new games with which to gain hype, they told people that it was going to play BluRay, have cable service and live streaming capabilities that far exceeded all of the others. Rather than a gaming console, they wanted to replace literally every other high level media in a household. The idea was that the Xbox One would be the center of an entire family's entertainment rather than just playing to the niche of gaming culture.
Unpacking this, it still feels like this was a brainchild of both mismanagement and poor planning. Either a family would be required to purchase a multiple Xbox Ones in order to fill every bedroom and living room, or they would have one for the entire family to watch movies, TV shows while also bearing the burden of being little Timmy's way of playing new games. In retrospect, the idea had flaws down to the very foundation. When was the gamer actually supposed to find time to play the newest releases for the Xbox system when the rest of the family was counting on it to play their movies and other forms of media?
Then they decided to bury themselves in even more controversy and show their true intentions with the console. Not only was it required to be purchased with the Kinect, an item that was already condemned as a meaningless add-on, but it also had a program that would marry one game to one console alone. That's right, you can only play new games in this console and you could not loan out your used games to friends, nor sell them to game stores. GameStop took issue with this, obviously, since the vast majority of their revenue came from used games. Gamers were not all swimming in money. It was quite the contrary in most cases and many collections were filled with used titles that were marked down. Xbox doubled down on this decision, stating that if they wanted to loan a game to a friend, they would need to pay a fee in order to do so. These restrictions were clearly meant to strangle every single customer for as much money as they could, even when it came to reselling the game to "certain retailers".
One of the worst parts about this was the announcement that this system was always supposed to be online. That may seem arbitrary to some, but there are many out there who do not have a very stable internet connection. If the game console goes offline, you immediately lost the use of the Xbox One and the games you have loaded on it, whether you had the physical copies or not. After an enormous bit of backlash from this, the CEO of Xbox, Don Mattrick, in all of his lack of intelligence, announced in an interview that "for people who do not have an internet connection, there is another machine, it's called the Xbox 360". Once again, more and more people decided to side with the PS4, stating that they got the message loud and clear. This was such a callous and thoughtless comment, it brought about the theory that he was actively trying to make this console fail. Of course, they went from always online to only needing to be online once a day to check in with the Xbox servers.
Giving credence to the idea that Mattrick stopped caring about the Xbox One altogether, he left the company soon after the controversy hit critical. He hit the road and instead went to Zynga so that he could leave that company as well two years later. This is one very large, glaring issue with the gaming industry as a whole. If things aren't going their way and they find themselves between a rock and a hard place, they can just zipline out of the company while it burns to the ground, taking their ridiculous amount of money with them. Why this man was ever given an opportunity after this blatant show of stupidity is a mystery all its own.
The Kinect also became a point of concern for many, as it was always required to be on. They said that this was only so that it could have its voice activation on call for when someone wanted to turn on the Xbox One verbally. People saw this as very suspicious and began to wonder how much information they were gathering about each individual customer through both audio and video feeds. To try and reassure people, they told them that none of the data they collected was going to be used for any nefarious things like selling it to outside sources. However, the data was, in fact, being collected. The demand to remove the Kinect from the console was in an uproar, but Microsoft said that the Xbox One and the little camera gathering data were part of the same machine by design and it could not be removed. This was an outright lie, as they did remove it later on after the highest peaks in the controversy. It also had the added bonus of removing 100 space bucks from the price as a result.
Playstation did not help matters in the slightest, when push came to shove. They came out in front of the public and told people all of their features for PS4, which were not even real "features". They were, however, vast improvements over what was being promised for the Xbox One. They didn't require to always be online, they told people that all you needed to do to share your video game is to let them borrow it, they were focusing on making great games for the console, and the price tag for the Playstation 4 was 100 space bucks less. They even made a show of it. Two guys went on the screen and showed you the only step that you needed in order to share your games with each other, and it was just a guy handing another guy a game and him saying "Thank you". Ouch.
There was another very large nail in the Xbox One's coffin, the price. It was 500 smackers! This was a ridiculous price, especially with how much they were planning to price the games and all of the other accessories that were not included with its purchase. Every single announcement that Microsoft came out with only convinced customers that this was not the console for them and the backlash only got worse as time went on and Microsoft continually failed to see the forest for the trees. By the time they started making the console more affordable and implimenting different improvements and services for it to flourish, the damage was already done.
They had to race to meet PS4's quality and they even improved it to the point where it had backward compatibility with the Xbox 360 in some of its games. They put in a service called the Game Pass, where people could have an entire barrage of games for a monthly fee and started to focus more on new games rather than every other type of media, but it was all for nothing. The launch for the Xbox One was such a disaster that it became impossible to keep up. The good will that the 360 brought to the community was gone and they were playing catch up years after the Xbone came out. It helped to some degree but they had already lost the console wars.
If there was any generation of consoles to win, this was the one that needed it the most. Not only was the gaming industry becoming more and more competitive, the culture of digital games was blooming and that meant a big shift in the industry as a whole. Xbox One missed the mark, and that meant that all of the digital games that were sold for the console were not going to be bought for the next generations of consoles. If you bought games digitally for the PS4, there was very little chance that you would even consider moving over to the Xbox Series X for the next gaming experience. The digital library is fairly locked in by this point and all of it was made playable on the PS5. All of that revenue Microsoft could have gotten for people buying a new console under the Xbox banner was up in flames.
As of the writing of this article, the Xbox is still feeling the effects of this gigantic misstep. The gaming industry's greed is still ever present, but never has it been so clearly unmasked in the public eye. They did everything to try and make up for their attempts to syphon money from their customers, but they lost all of the trust they had garnered in the years before. No one can blame the public for siding with Playstation on this one. Sony may also be greedy and constantly lie to gamers, but at least they do it while selling a product people actually want. It's a very sad notion that we need to catered to by thieves but that's the reality we live in. The gaming industry is hitting a gigantic low point because of it, but all we can do is hope for a brighter future and remember to drink water.
