Don Mattrick fully earned his place in the bad video game executive hall of fame. People remember the various ways in which the Xbox One launch was botched, ranging from the confusing and ahead of its time in a bad way DRM, compounded by Mattrick’s condescending “if you don’t have reliable Internet just play your 360” comments, and, of course, the Kinect. Microsoft built the system and its marketing around a mandatory peripheral that didn’t work and that it never had any compelling software for. And one that spied on you to boot! It was an ill considered approach worthy of Sega at its peak 32X stupidity.
What people don’t remember as much is that the back half of the Xbox 360, when it lost its advantage to Sony and ended up in close to a dead heat after dominating the first half of the generation, was almost as bad. The Kinect was a cool idea but it was expensive and never worked outside a few very specific applications. It was the kind of thing that looked amazing in commercials and was extremely disappointing for everyone who used it outside a small core of tech obsessives who are willing to put up with extreme jank. And yet Microsoft focused on this thing almost exclusively in the back half of its best generation, pushing it relentlessly with massive marketing campaigns and focusing most software development on it. The Xbox 360 almost abandoned exclusives at the time that third parties came to understand the PS3 architecture and were putting out equal ports (nullifying the 360’s chief advantage) and Sony’s exclusive output had evolved from Heavenly Sword to The Last of Us.
Then Xbox took that crappy peripheral and built their next system around it, jacking up the price $100 and cutting corners on the hardware that people would use to play the games they actually liked and wanted to play, which Xbox compensated for by not making many games that anyone actually liked and wanted to play.
What people also forget is that in addition to the Kinect the Xbox One was built around TV. Not streaming integration but actual cable TV. The Xbox had a port for an HDMI in, an IR blaster to control your cable box, and the OS featured a “snap” function that let you pin a small TV feed into a vertical bar on the side of your screen so you could have a postage stamp sized picture in picture going as you played. This snap feature came at the cost of using a bunch of Xbox One’s already behind the curve processing power and unlike the Wii U’s ability to toss TV to a tablet it didn’t actually do anything you couldn’t already with the picture in picture function most TVs already have, let alone the plethora of secondary screens people already had in late 2013, well into the age of universal smart phone adoption.
It was an idiotic idea that only someone who profoundly misunderstood entertainment and where it was going could come up with, and Microsoft’s whole team deserves condemnation for pursuing it. The Xbox One was seemingly designed by people who did not like video games and wanted to make their black VCR shaped box do everything under the sun but play them.
So the Xbox One launched at a high price point with a bunch of games with crappy Kinect integration and a reputation for being underpowered and riddled with DRM. Despite a respectable launch lineup that included graphical showpiece Ryse: Son of Rome and the exclusive Dead Rising 3 along with the interesting seasonal fighting game Killer Instinct and a bunch of ports of Madden and COD, it landed in the market crippled. It sold well at first to people hungry for new hardware but soon fell behind PS4 and never threatened to catch up again.
Cleaning up this mess would not be easy and Mattrick would not be the guy to do it. He was quickly moved on to Zynga, a company that made more of the types of games he seemed to like, and the admired Phil Spencer moved up to take his place. Over the next seven years he would unwind all of Mattrick’ big decisions. The Kinect would soon be debundled and then discontinued, a humiliating admission that it had been a terrible idea to begin with, and an experiment that would end without even the suite of fun party software that the 360 version got. Snapping TV onto the screen would be removed from the OS to free up power for games and eventually all TV function including on screen guides would be stripped from the OS. Spencer would oversee a new revision of the console into the Xbox One X, which was very specifically marketed as more powerful than Sony’s PS4 Pro, targeting gamers who wanted performance without buying a PC. Microsoft would triple down on games, adding backwards compatibility for a huge swath of old 360 and original Xbox games, and purchasing new studios to replace the one that Mattrick let atrophy or closed during the Kinect era, when exclusive games had become an afterthought.
Spencer would also pursue a strategy trying to play to Microsoft’s strengths, saving Xbox by moving beyond the Xbox hardware. He would make all Xbox games available on PC, Microsoft’s home platform, pursuing players wherever they were and making Xbox development more economically viable despite a smaller install base. He would also create Game Pass, a service that would attract players to the platform without exclusives by giving them access to the “Netflix of games.” He would oversee close integration of the Xbox controller into the Windows environment, establishing it as the base controller for PC players and making sure that Xbox peripherals remained relevant for players even if they didn’t want to buy an Xbox One. He bought Minecraft and maintained its ubiquitous presence on all platforms instead of killing it by restricting it to Xbox only. He stepped boldly into game streaming before it was really ready, hoping to establish Microsoft in that market before it matured and pursuing entertainment in the direction it was actually going instead of chasing cable TV like it was still 1998.
These steps were all pretty radical and have their critics, but it’s worth noting that Sony has followed almost every part of this plan (though its streaming plans were in place earlier than Xbox’s.) Sony’s games are on PC now, years after Xbox started. Sony has subscription tiers to PlayStation Plus, clearly chasing Game Pass though without Microsoft’s commitment to putting first party games there. The PlayStaiton 5 is backwards compatible, unlike PS4, because the feature was very popular on Xbox One, even if not that many actually used it. PlayStation is still the dominant high powered console but its clear that in some ways Microsoft is the strategic leader, making smart moves that even arrogant Sony feels the need to emulate.
The one area that Microsoft has not managed to turn thins around is in its game production, which remains a mixed bag at best. Despite all of Microsoft’s acquisitions it would continue to struggle putting out top tier games that people wanted to play, where Sony would ascend to the Nintendo tier where every first party game felt like an event. Even Microsoft’s huge older franchises would languish, with Halo going from absolutely dominant shooter to just another franchise putting out games with a mixed reputation. Gears of War would become the last franchise standing in a genre that was well out of fashion. Microsoft would fail to build new big series with games like Recore and Quantum Break being middling successes at best. The only major new franchise established during the Xbox One era would be Forza Horizon, the first of which was a late 360 game, though Microsoft would have a bit more luck with smaller games like the Ori series and its funding of Cuphead, though neither would end up as exclusives. Microsoft’s disastrous performance in Japan would continue to be a massive problem, with the biggest Japanese releases coming to Xbox if there was no deal with Sony, but smaller Japanese games skipping the platform to focus on PlayStation and Switch.
Ultimately you can argue that Xbox has still not recovered from the Xbox One era. Spencer himself has said this, calling the 8th gen the “worst generation to lose” because of the switch to digital libraries carried over with backwards compatibility. Xbox has also failed to create new must play games despite its massive expansion via studio purchases. Xbox Series continues to languish behind PS5 and you can argue that launching the vastly underpowered Xbox Series S was a strategic mistake, though unlike Kinect and TV integration it was at least a reasonable idea (cheap things remain popular, unlike cable TV.)
But 10 years after the Xbox One launch Xbox continues to be relevant in the industry, having survived one of the worst major company launches in history. This is probably only because of the deep pockets of the parent company, which could bail Xbox out with financial support and studio purchases that a company like Sega didn’t have. Still, there were rumblings of Microsoft abandoning games and spinning off Xbox in the 360 era and coming out of the Xbox One era it has instead doubled down, buying Bethesda and Activision through painful and expensive mergers. Xbox now owns Elder Scrolls and Call of Duty, along with Doom and, of course, Blinx the Time Sweeper.
It's worth noting as well that Xbox One remains a relevant platform in 2023. 10 years after launch it continues to get new games and not just sports games or the cheapest licensed stuff but big new releases. This is primarily because of how easy it is to port games between platforms in 2023, and backwards compatibility meaning that an Xbox One version will run on the Series system, but it’s still impressive. 10 years is an enormous lifespan and when you look at something like the 32X or the Saturn, which barely survived a few years of relevance, having Armored Core and Street Fighter coming out on Xbox One 10 years after its terrible launch definitely shows something. The Xbox One has an astonishingly good library. Not an astonishingly good library of exclusives, but if it was your only console for the last 10 years you’ve had a ton of amazing stuff to play.
Personally the Xbox One is one of my favorite consoles of all time. I bought both Xbox One and PS4 at launch but ended up more of an Xbox gamer. This was both because I had been primarily a 360 gamer (I owned a PS3 but vastly preferred the Xbox 360 controller to the tiny Dual Shock 3) and because my best friend got an Xbox One because PS4s were hard to obtain near launch, so we ended up playing a bunch on Xbox Live together. I also loved the Xbox One X as the most powerful console, and appreciated backwards compatibility. I have a lot of affection for Xbox One and I still use mine to this day. I think the OS is unfairly maligned and the controller somewhat unappreciated. I think the incredible backwards compatibility function that upscales and smooths framerates is almost miraculous. I think Sunset Overdrive is great. But the most impressive thing about Xbox One is how well it has moved on from one of the worst launches in history to become a console that isn’t seen as a disaster. Only the 3DS has ever recovered more successfully. I don’t know what the future holds for Xbox, but the present could be much, much, worse if not for the radical attempts to turn the Xbox One into something that people would actually want to play, as opposed to the KinecTV box it was intended to be.
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