So this is going to be the Xbox one's third Christmas in the market and I'd thought it would be fun to look back and see how the console has progressed over the last few years.

Me personally, while I do play my PS4 more due to multi platform titles usually being better there, I think they've made a lot of really good steps to fix the disaster that was the original launch. I love what there doing with backwards compatibility with 360 titles, I feel they have stepped up there game on exclusives, and they have been rather responsive to what people had issues with regarding the original console (size, price, and getting rid of Kinect)

With that said though, its doubtful that they'll catch PS4 at this point. But I think that they're thinking they don't really have to and there betting on project Scorpio to try and make up some of the difference in this upcoming half generation war were about to have with PS4 pro and Project Scorpio.

I think it is a good console, and the download speeds on live are just so much better than the PS4. I am more likely to by 3rd parties on PS4 because that is where my friends play, but the games I do have on the One have been good experiences. Considering the jump in digital sales this generation I think the whole launch thing was as overblown, but anymore people seem to need to pick sides on everything.

My Xbox one has been relegated to the "If I can't play it anywhere else" box. With their new play anywhere initiative and generally not that enticing first-party games it's seen very little play this year. Also, even with the new design the xbox controller still hurts my hands.

I'm with Ares42. It's sort of like a Nintendo console in that it's only good for things I can't find elsewhere. And now with its exclusives (all? most? MS has been unclear) being on PC that really means it's a nothing box for me.

While I may make fun of the huge size (before the S), slow UI, price (at intro), etc. it's really not a bad machine. But 2nd place can be a harsh mistress.

They decided to release all exclusives on PC so I have even less of a reason to get one than I did 3 years ago, and I had no reason back then.

It's been great. I've used it way more than my PC this year. They've done a good job of turning that shit show around

Seems like a decent piece of hardware, but just as others have said, I really only have it for the exclusives, and so it doesn't get used much. Which is exactly how it was on the X360 for me. I currently have 7 Xbox One games vs 26 on PS4 (only counting physical)

Nothing really negative comes to mind except for the interface.. which might just be personal preference. If there are other issues I have, I can't really think of them off the top of my head. Probably because I barely use it.

Was in the camp of "eventually, when it's cheap, I guess" into the camp of "I think there are less than a handful of games I -must- own that aren't on another console, pc or play anywhere"

It's that machine that I have to clean the layers upon layers of dust off of every time I want to play Sunset Overdrive. I would have used it to play other exclusives, as was my intention when I bought it when Sunset came out. But seeing as how Microsoft is just putting their shit on PC, even Halo, fuck this thing.

Man I want sunset overdrive! Argh

-I think the Xbox One finally had it's first great year. The Xbox One S came out of the gate looking great, people picked it up, everyone is happy with it. At the same time we got Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4, which are both awesome and the PC cross-play has finally arrived.

-Killer Instinct continues to be my favorite go-to fighting game, and this year they just nailed it with balance and the new characters. Again, the cross-play is a wonderful addition here.

-I think the backwards compatibility has given it new legs in ways I wasn't expecting. I probably picked up ten Xbox 360 games this year that I had missed. The updates have been pretty good.

-The UI seems beyond fixing at this point, I think Steam is seeing something similar with the glut of just stuff. The Xbox has so many games, movies, apps, music, the store just isn't equipped to handle it. None of the content is compelling enough to explore.

-Major fail: Cortana ruined all of the voice functionality I had come to know and love. I disabled her after an evening of misfires.

It's still my go-to media center kill-all and primary console. I think it will continue to get better next year, and has a bit of a ways to go before it reaches parity with the Playstation 4.

I have mixed feelings about my XB1 which I picked up this year with H5 and after 50 hours I hate the game it was the only exclusive from MS I cared about. Backwards compatibility is a great feature that makes me keep the XB1 and I've never used as all my game last gen were on disc which I don't have anymore, every sale and GWG needs a sub which I don't have cause I never use the console its a vicious circle. As I don't regurly use the XB1 I find the UI especially the store a constant pain and source of frustration the navigation sound drive me nuts.

Three years later the XB1 is a fine console nothing more which in itself is a massive improvement, I'm just really bored with MS first party output theres nothing exciting on the horizon.

The games I've really liked Horizon 2 & 3, Sunset Overdrive, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Inside. The last two came out to other platforms, but had timed exclusive windows, so I'll give them to the Xbox One.

Halo 5's campaign wasn't that great. The multi player was fine.

Gears 4 was fun and enjoyable, nothing that new or different.

Honestly, MS first party games are most of the time fine and inoffensive, but never daring or innovative. They never go for it, or are aww inspiring.

Even though I have a pretty good gaming PC and future exclusives are cross platform now, I still love my Xbox.

I really love Halo, I started playing Halo 5 again after they released that big update a week or two ago and it's been awesome.

Backwards comparability is pretty cool.

Another thing is Gears 4 competitive multiplayer on the PC is on deaths door which is why they tried to do that cross platform weekend event and my friend told me Titanfall 2 on PC only has a 2000-3000 people online(in our region?) as opposed to the 15,000+ on Xbox, which is why I bought the game on Xbox. Obviously there's still a much larger player base on the console, so that's still one advantage for the console when it comes to competitive multiplayer games, except moba's and rts's of course

My biggest complaint is the UI, it's really clunky and a pain in the ass to navigate and Cortana is TERRIBLE, I don't know how it's worse than the last thing they had.

Overall this is probably the best year for Xbox One.

I actually think the Xbox has better exclusives than the PS4. Rise of the Tomb Raider, Inside, Sunset Overdrive, Forza Horizon 2/3, Gears of War, etc. Yeah, I know, some of these games came to other consoles later, but I played these right when they came out, when they were only on the Xbox.

PS4 has great exclusives too (Uncharted for example) but I just don't think they have the sheer amount of exclusives that the Xbox has.

That being said, I almost play all of my third party games on the PS4. The Xbox One controller doesn't feel as good as a Dualshock 4 cause I think the right and left bumpers are positioned in a weird way, making me have to adjust in an awkward fashion every time I hit the bumpers. Not a big deal, but the Dualshock 4 is an excellent controller, so I'd rather just go with that.

Can't believe 3 years went by so fast since the Xbox One got released. What bothers me the most about the Xbox One is: Why do you need to install games on the Xbox One with a disc and still insert the disc even though you installed it already? Also it just takes up space. How come the Xbox 360 was simple? All you had to do was insert a game and play it, no installation, no memory capacity taken up. It's weird. Just wanted to point this out. All in all, it's a good console, I've been an Xbox fan for a long while, I like Xbox, it's good. The Xbox One is good, i like the games on it such as Halo, Quantum Break, and it's Netflix app which 360 already had.

Also I've been a PlayStation fan too, I still have my original ps1 and ps2. Also I have the ps3. PS4, haven't gotten the chance to try it out.

Honestly, my only real gripe, and I guess it's kind of a big one when you think about, is the UI. Maybe it's just not a widespread issue, but I find it to be terribly laggy.

Sometimes, there's a short, but noticeable input delay. Sometimes, it kind of hitches up for 2-3 seconds. The most unforgivable one in my eyes is that when I was browsing the store like just last week, I had scrolled pretty far down, opened a game page, and then backed out. However, instead of dropping me back where I was or just leaving me at the top of the page, it started at the top of the page, but then automatically scrolled down a few rows, but the images for the games hadn't loaded. So it had to wait to catch up and load them in....then it scrolled down a few more rows and then it stopped until it loaded the images and got caught up again. That kept on repeating until it finally got to where I originally left off. When I finally figured out what was going on, I was shocked that it was this bad.

I don't know what's going, but I would kill for a simplified interface. Aside from just being kinda janky, I just don't like the way some stuff is organized.

Other than that though, it's a pretty dope console.

There was another thread recently about backwards compatibility and I'd say it's one of the major reasons the Xbox has been able to remain relevant and generate buzz. There's something inherently awesome about popping in the same disc I bought years ago (sure, I know it's just an authenticator) and playing a cleaned up version of the same game, with Xbox Live multiplayer intact seamlessly across both 360 and X1.

Microsoft has the only exclusives I care about. Playing those games on PC would require me to use the shitshow that is the Windows Store. In the case of Gears there'd be nobody to play against, with Halo there'd be no matchmaking, and cross your fingers if you can get Forza to work. For games where the large draw is the multiplayer? Yeah, I'll stick with Xbox.

My main gripes with the UI are having to tab over way too many options to get to my captures, and when the menus feel unresponsive. Otherwise never had an issue finding what I need (aka My Games & Apps). Edit: Pins are also your friend.

Microsoft (and Sony) requires you to insert the disc as an anti-disc duplication measure. Without it, you can simply install the game and sell/give away the disc to someone else, who will then install the disc and continue the process. It's a bummer, but I can see why the requirement is in place. After all, the reason these companies are in the games business is to sell games, and giving consumers a way to play games without paying for them is just bad business.

As for why the Xbox 360 was so simple compared to this gen is because disc read speeds have become the bottleneck in processing game data. Basically, current gen games process data too fast for the laser to read the data off the disc. Add to that the size of data being processed, and loading from a disc would simply take too long. It's much faster to read that data off a hard drive, so that's why the console makers require an install. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if at some point this gen that there's a refresh of the Xbox or PS4 that does not include a disc drive. It's unlikely, but possible.

Sunset Overdrive was fun. Wish I could sell the system for more than peanuts because that game's the only good experience I've had with it.

@darth_navster: True, but it's still bull to me. It just doesn't make sense, because literally 10-20 Xbox One games (depending on which games like Quantum Break takes up almost 50 GB) can fill up your 500 GB storage already, that's insane, just saying. I know it's to prevent disc copying or reselling the game, etc. The Xbox 360, you couldn't do that, you need the disc to play, if you give it to a friend, he can play it on his 360 but you won't be able to play it on yours since you can't install it neither do you have your own disc if it were to happen. And you're right it's trully bad business, companies have been money hungry way too much. The current gen games process data too fast for the laser to read the data off the disc, that I'm not sure on, could be true, for the reason why the game has to be installed within the harddrive, etc. Also it's true that the Xbox One was originally going to have no disc tray, literally, not kidding. Phil Spencer stated that (i think he's CEO of Xbox or boss of it, something like that), he originally wanted to only be digital, but the reason why he decided to keep the disc tray feature was because not everybody in the world had good bandwidth internet to install a game digitally which takes up more space than a disc.

Xbox One download speeds are not better than PS4, I've never had any issue with either but I think the PS4 downloads maybe a little faster.

I do have gigabit internet, fwiw.

The OS/Interface for the XB1 is broken garbage though. And SLOW.

My main gripe is with the installation from discs and update management. On PS4 you can start playing as soon as you put the disc in the console while on Xbox One you have to wait at least 20 minutes before starting if the installation doesn't stop for no reason (that has happened to me a lot). XBox prevents you for starting your game if you don't update it or go offline, but if you go offline you can't download the update. PS4 lets you play your game while the update is loading in the background and install it later when you quit the game. I really don't understand how Microsoft thinks it's a good way to do that, their own OS, Windows, lets you download upgrades in the background. It's crazy that Sony is doing better in the OS side than Microsoft.

Only gets turned on if my friends decide to play. Also really enjoy getting the free games with gold. Other than that I rarely use it. Played Horizon 3 on PC.

I am interested in seeing what the scorpio brings, otherwise the xbone is a pass for me until it's dirt cheap.

I got one super cheap over Black Friday, and it's great as a stop gap. I didn't want to spend as much on a PS4 pro or upgrade my PC, and I know Scorpio's down the road as well. I'm hesitant about getting a PS4 slim too now that pros on the market. The TV stuff is cool and I like the community integration. Basically, it's nice to have access to current gen cheaply through XB1 while I wait and see how Pro/Scorpio pan out.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat, where I play multi-platform games more on the PS4 unless they're as good on the Xbox One, because I want to equal out the amount of games for both systems, but still, I like the Xbox One as much as the PS4. As for backwards compatibility, I was someone prior to it being on the system that just didn't care about it, but the way they utilize it on the One I am a fan of, and honestly, over time my feelings have somewhat changed because I don't want to plug the 360 back in to play those older games. I think, if we can talk about this-gen in general though, so both Xbox One and PS4 (Wii U is considered as this-gen as well, but I'm not talking about that here), there hasn't really been any 'killer app' first party titles to me; no game to reach the greatness of something like The Last of Us if you will, at least not to me. Early in Xbox 360's life cycle, there was that. I mean, 2006 alone had some fantastic games that were only on the Xbox 360.

I love my Xbox. It's taken over the role as my main gaming machine after my PC had a few good years. I even just bought a 1070 and still find myself prefering to play everything on Xbox. The ecosystem is great. It's where all of my gaming history is, whether that's rock band dlc, other backwards compatible digital purchases, or just good ole achievements. The club features they just added in make interacting with other giant bomb Xbox users super easy. I love having a place within the console where we can share our clips, screen shots, and comments with each other. It's all good stuff.

@retrometal: Well you must be the odd case out then, everyone I know with both have awful download speeds on the PS4 with almost twice the speed on one. With all ranges in internet speeds.

This. I love how certain ground rules have already been agreed upon by the GB community - like any Burnout Paradise clip must include the song Girlfriend. I've joined clubs for formerly dead multiplayer communities like Perfect Dark and Shadowrun '07 (which I never thought would have people playing ever again) and the Looking for Group feature has made it really easy to arrange a time for everyone to play together. Next on my wishlist is Splinter Cell so the old school Spies vs Mercs community can resurface, because right now it's damn near impossible to get a game of SvM on PC.

Glad I didn't get one. Microsoft messed it up beyond recognition. First, they didn't launch in my country, which is western Europe so it kind of makes no sense, until 8 months later. It was a real: 'hey, fuck you, we don't care about your business' message. Then they did the play anywhere thing. A fantastic feature, except it makes the Xbox undesirable if you don't own one yet. At least for someone in my situation, which is a 1-person household.

There is no reason to ever get one.

Pretty lukewarm feelings about either. The money I could have spent on both consoles instead went into a very powerful computer a few years later. And I'm using my PC all the time anyway, which means the idea of going to my couch, turning on the TV, putting in discs, waiting, waiting, updating, loud jet engine noise, waiting, before actually getting to play puts me to sleep just thinking about it.

I was pretty excited about both consoles when they came out, but these days the idea of getting one is no longer interesting. TLOU 2 will probably end up forcing my hand though.

Meanwhile, in reality: go to the couch, turn TV on with remote, pick up Xbox controller and use it to turn on the Xbox, no need to put in disc if you're playing digital or continuing the last game you played, game starts in a few seconds as it updates overnight (it's been months since I've actually had to wait for an update), if you're continuing the last game you played the game starts from exactly where you left off - just un-pause and continue, and the console is completely silent (even my launch model).

Unless you mean the initial game installation process in which case results vary depending on how fast your broadband is - in my case installing the bulk of the game from a disc is many times faster than downloading the entire thing via Steam (a 50Gb game with a launch day patch can be ready to play in an hour or two, the same thing on Steam, e.g. Doom, takes multiple days to download) - if you're broadband is super fast then that might not be the case for you.

Edit: Agree about TLOU 2 - might be the game that makes me finally get a PS4.

The free games (and deals) with Gold have been good, and I can't count how many times I see something free on PSN that I got a while back on XB Gold.

That said, the performance of the OS and the hardware just decayed so frustratingly fast in the lifecycle. Lots of lag, it has to think about things you tell it to do, such a hassle. I have to physically push down on the disc drive to get it to read discs, which is borderline unacceptable since it's just a DRM measure anyway.

And good lord, the dashboard layout. Ugh.

The backwards compatible was a big step for me, and the games with gold has been pretty good. The UI doesn't really bother me but I haven't messed around with a ps4 all that much so I have nothing to compare it to. It could definitely be better,buy I don't regret getting it

I think they turned the ship around fairly well considering the shit direction they were going at launch. They're doing awesome work by recognizing that the PC is in MS territory and are putting out their first-party titles out on there too.

Xbox UI still sucks shit through a straw though.

I think they're doing right by the people who are sticking by them, but they are doing very little to get people that don't already own that system to develop interest in it.

About the same as the PS4, from what I can tell. That is, it's fine, and probably pretty great if you don't own a PC, but I could spend all day shitting on the unbelievably terrible UI. Sometimes, I don't even want to turn my Xbox on because I'd have to navigate through that fucking slow, cumbersome user interface. Who looks at that and goes "yeah, this is fine, this is what we want to show our consumers"?

Otherwise, as I said, it's fine. It's got some good exclusives, there are lots of games available for it, etc.

As some one who thought they would never get an Xbox One and just picked an S a few months ago: I really like it a lot. I mainly got it because I had a hankering to play through Halo again and thats really only possible with an Xbox. So I decided to get an Xbox One S (the s is also a fantastic looking console) halo bundle that came with the master chief collection and halo 5. What further compelled me to pick up and Xbox was knowing I could play red dead and fable 2 again. That said I also have a ps4 that I will still most likely play games with multiple console releases. I know people complain about the OS being slow but at least for the S I have no problems with that. I'm not sure if that is just me being more tolerable or if the S is in fact a snappier machine.

I sort of bought into THE ONE media aspect of this console. I have my cable box hooked up to it and I really like the extra features you get with this like being able to the change the channel on my media remote or computer and phone. I've forgone using my built in smart tv apps in favor of the xbox. I use Netflix, HBO GO, Amazon Video, WWE Network, FX Now, and Crunchy Roll. The Simpsons sub FX Now app is also pretty cool to have.

If you would have told me at the Xbox One launch that I would not only own one but use it fairly regularly I wouldn't have believed you. They really had a lot going against them going into this cycle and I dont think they could've turned it around any better. The interesting thing to me is that besides the lack of kinect, the Xbox One is largely what it was originally sold as conceptually. The biggest turn around they seem to have made is within their PR and their relation to consumers.

Not too hot, sold mine back in May and spent that money on PS4 stuffs. Sunset Overdrive was the only exclusive I really enjoyed on the platform, otherwise it kinda collected dust 'cept for Rise of The Tomb Raider and few other games. If I actually wouldn't be a terrible hermit, I might've got more out of the system with The Master Chief Collection, but as it is, it was kind of a bummer thing that I originally only bought because I had way toomuch money to spare.

Maybe I'll jump back in with Scorpio, we'll see.