- Thanks to LastPass for sponsoring
a portion of this video.
Definitely be sure to check them out at the link
in the description.
This is why the Xbox One failed.
- Now, I'm so excited to announce that Xbox One will launch
this November in 21 markets around the world at $499
in the US...
- Did you catch that?
That was the moment right there that sealed the fate
of the Xbox One, a few short hours later,
Sony announced the more powerful and cheaper PlayStation 4
and with one simple video, they cemented their dominance
over the generation of consoles, what went wrong?
Now that we're on the cusp of a new console generation
it's easy to forget that there actually was a lot
that the Xbox One brought to the table.
Now, when you look back at the Xbox 360, it was of course
massively successful and still to this day
the most popular Xbox of all time,
but it went about things in a very different way
than the Xbox One, where Microsoft opted to go
for a little bit of a safer strategy and they chose AMD
to build not only the CPU but also the GPU
in one contained SoC.
Essentially this meant that the Xbox One was for all
intents and purposes very, very similar
to a Windows gaming PC.
For years, PC gamers complained that the Xbox 360
and PlayStation 3 were holding them back,
and there was a lot of truth to that.
So, not only were these consoles based on very different
architectures, but ultimately they were only running
with about a half a gigabyte of memory,
which especially when you consider what kind of games
were able to be pulled off with such a tiny amount of RAM
and running off of DVD drives, it is kind of incredible.
But there is no doubt that for years,
those consoles were really holding back the PC space,
both Sony and Microsoft chose AMD to build their next
generation, but they're also pretty heavily constrained.
Remember, this is AMD before the days of Ryzen
that we of course are getting on this next
generation of consoles.
Instead, AMD at the time on the desktop,
were pushing their Bulldozer based FX CPU's,
which sucked I think would be a nice way of putting it,
which really meant that the only thing that was really
suitable for a console were their much smaller and much
weaker Jaguar mobile-based CPU cores.
This in many scenarios meant that the brand new eight-core
chips inside the PS4 and Xbox One, were actually not
as powerful as the CPU's on the Xbox 360 and specifically
on the PlayStation 3.
So, tradeoffs, tradeoffs.
Thankfully graphics is an area where the Xbox One
was a much bigger step forward, but the problem was over
on the Sony side of the fence, they had bet very heavily
on the faster but more expensive GDDR5 Memory.
The problem was was that because this was so expensive
for quite a while Sony expected to only be able to ship
four gigabytes of RAM and here Microsoft saw an advantage.
If they could ship eight gigs of RAM,
which was a little bit slower on the Xbox One,
they will have an advantage, right?
Well, yes, except that Sony was able to ship eight gigs
of GDDR5, meaning that they had parody on the actual amount
of memory and the Xbox One was stuck with a GPU which
was much smaller because they had to build an ESRAM buffer
into it, they had the slower RAM, it was a little
bit more difficult to work with, it was a bet that just
didn't pay off and it meant that the entire history
of the Xbox One has had it trailing pretty significantly
the performance of the PlayStation 4, which let's not
forget, it was also cheaper at the same time.
So, E3 2013, was my very first E3 and that was the show
where both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 was shown off
for the very first time.
Or at least technically the Xbox One did have a briefing
a couple of weeks before, but it was basically an hour
and a half of TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, oh, by the way,
this thing plays games, but have you heard
about the TV features?
It didn't help that the Xbox One had a kind
of lackluster launch lineup.
Sure, games like Forza looked great, when you look at
that side by side side with some of the other major
titles like Sunset Overdrive and Ryse: Son of Rome,
those were pretty looking games, they were fun,
but they weren't really console sellers,
especially when you put that alongside the fact that while
Microsoft had a huge lead with Indie developers back
on the Xbox Live Arcade days, by the time the Xbox One
came out, that was pretty much completely thrown away,
and guess who was there to scoop up all those Indies?
Of course, it was Sony and their brand new PlayStation 4.
Kinda see where I'm going with this one.
Probably the biggest issue was around Xboxes,
very aggressive DRM strategy.
So the first thing was all games even the physical ones
were tied to your Xbox live account.
Now, that on the surface might not seem like a bad thing
obviously all of our digital games do that today,
however, the problem was that even the physical DVD
that you would have gone out and bought in physical Blu-Ray,
that would have been tied to you permanently.
So that meant a couple of things, and there were some
upsides, so for example, you could share with up to 10
of your family members and you could actually share
an Xbox game with one of your Xbox Live friends.
Now you had to do that only once so you couldn't just
be constantly swapping back and forth, and it had to be
in their possession for at least 30 days,
but that was theoretically a cool feature.
The problem though, was that you had to be online
every 24 hours so the thing is, this was where a lot
of people got very upset because before the Xbox One
had actually been announced, Microsoft had kinda made
some waves, I'm like, oh no, it won't be always online,
and then they immediately were like, oh yeah,
it's always online.
By far the biggest issue though, was no trade ins
kind of, okay, so the rule was publishers,
the individual game publishers can actually choose
what they wanted to allow you to do with the physical games
that you bought, so obviously right now in the ultimate
policy was that you buy it, you sell it,
it's just super simple.
But back in the Xbox One, when they first announced it,
essentially if a publisher wanted to, they could say,
oh, you know what?
That physical copy you can never sell it again,
it can never be reactivated by anyone ever.
Or alternatively, they could have charged you 10, 20 bucks,
whatever they wanted to reactivate that code for the game.
This, I don't need to tell you when over just about
as well as you might expected.
Ultimately this meant that the head of Xbox at the time,
Don Mattrick was very swiftly fired,
like within a couple of weeks of this first E3 presentation.
And with that, the Xbox One while it was now
on a much better path they pretty much walked back all
of these to the policies that we know today,
but the Xbox One was starting out from absolutely horrendous
position, more expensive, not as powerful,
the entire internet hating them, I mean all of the good will
that they had built up throughout the Xbox 360 generation
was gone in the matter of a couple of weeks.
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this portion of the video.
Another aspect that was poorly received is Kinect.
Now, it's easy to forget today, but when Kinect
first launched on the Xbox 360, it was wildly successful,
and it really gave a lot of new life to the 360,
which is almost five years old at that point.
So not only it was natural that when Microsoft decided
to start designing that Xbox One,
they put a lot of emphasis on Kinect 2.0,
except they maybe put a little too much emphasis
on the new version of Kinect.
Now I actually really liked Kinect, sure it was a little
bit big and bulky, but you could absolutely say
the same thing about the Xbox One,
and the voice recognition features were actually really
useful, I mean you've got to have to remember
that this was years before things like Google Assistant,
as well as Siri and Alexa had kind of completely taken over
sort of the smart home ecosystem.
Now, the actual camera functions I think were a little
bit more on the gimmicky side yes, it was higher fidelity
and there were some games that supported it,
but generally speaking the actual usefulness of Kinect
has mostly been relegated to like ghost
hunting these days.
Really though, Kinect was emblematic of a larger overall
issue with the Xbox One, it was just simply trying to do
too many things at once and because of that,
pretty much everything suffered.
So for example, when the Xbox first came out
and they had their famous TV, TV, TV sort of presentation,
they focused obviously very heavily on the media functions.
Some of which were cool, but things like the HDMI input
to allow you to route something like your cable box in
to function as a DVR were theoretically cool,
but it was never fully realized, and ultimately scrapped
several years into the Xbox One's life cycle.
Less than a year after the Xbox One launched,
they removed the requirement that you always had to use
Kinect and then started actually selling an Xbox One
without it included in the box at all,
bring the price down to $400 and finally reaching price
parity with the PlayStation 4.
It was a start, but they still had a long way to go.
The next major focus they had, was backwards compatibility.
Now, this is actually something that Microsoft had laid
the groundwork for years before the Xbox One
had even shipped, and when you look at the way
that they approached it as opposed to a company like Sony,
it was very, very different.
So, say when the PS2 came out, the way it was able to play
PlayStation 1 games, was by physically including
the processor from the PlayStation 1 on board.
It was the same thing for the launch PS3's,
with the Xbox One, Microsoft had an idea
that that is what they wanted to do from a very early time.
So, they actually did some things like building in some
of the core functions of the Xbox 360,
like the texture processing into the Xbox One chip
from day one.
So, when speaking with people on the Xbox team,
specifically on the backwards compatibility side
of the house, it's interesting to see just how much work
they've put into this.
So, as soon as Phil Spencer came in,
he really made a major effort to start putting a lot
of energy into backwards compatibility,
and when you think about where Xbox was in 2014, 2015,
it made a lot of sense.
Sony had pretty much completely abandoned,
any hope of backwards compatibility for the PlayStation 4,
short of something like PlayStation Now, which I mean,
I guess if you wanna pay to stream last gen games,
sure, have fun, but they knew that this was something
that could make a real difference.
This ultimately came to fruition pretty quickly at E3 2015,
so this was two years after the initial launch of the Xbox
One, they announced that they were bringing Xbox 360 games
to the platform and pretty quickly the games were coming
in at a very rapid rate.
And the important thing was,
this was true backwards compatibility.
Sure, a lot of these Xbox 360 games were being sold
via Xbox Live, but the main thing was,
was that your current Xbox 360 disc that you could buy
for a dollar each at GameStop could be dropped
with your Xbox One, and after a quick download
or maybe slightly longer download, but importantly
after a free download, you'll be up and running
with your Xbox One, playing your good
old classic 360 titles.
Over the last five years, they've expanded the amount
of not only 360 titles, but have also supported some
original Xbox games on the Xbox One.
As well as things like the Xbox One X can run some of these
titles at much higher resolutions that were far better
than the original console, it's very impressive
and ultimately, as we look toward the next generation,
all of the work that Microsoft put in to that backwards
compatibility is being ported over almost entirely
to the Xbox Series X.
Sure, the PlayStation 5, will be able to play
some PS4 games, but there's a difference between some
of your previous games versus the Xbox Series X,
which can claim that it can almost play every single Xbox
game ever regardless of which platform it was made for.
Now, if we're talking legacy, one of the things
that was introduced with the Xbox One's generation
is Xbox Game Pass, now if you're not familiar,
this is essentially Microsoft's attempt at building
the Netflix of gaming.
So, from anywhere from five to $15 a month,
based on your plan, you get access to hundreds of games
on Xbox, on PC, you get things like streaming games
via xCloud, as well as things like Xbox Live Gold
all bundled in.
And these aren't just sort of cheap whatever games
you're getting high quality, top tier titles
like Halo Infinite, like Forza, Gears, Flight Simulator
as well as a lot of other third party titles.
Now, to me, I think this is really where the Xbox brand
goes forward, who cares if they sell you an Xbox Series X
or an Xbox One or a PC, whatever the case is,
I think Microsoft are gonna make their money on selling you
the subscription to the game pass.
And then honestly, as a consumer,
I think it's a pretty good deal.
So, the thing is no one is going to look back
on the Xbox One and consider it to be a successful console.
Sure, it wasn't a huge failure,
like some other major consoles of the past,
when you look at it side by side with other Xboxes, sure
it did outsold the original Xbox, but it came nowhere
near to selling the same amount of units as the Xbox 360,
and when you look at it side by side with the PlayStation 4,
it was outsold over two to one.
But with a console like the Xbox One X retaking the world's
most powerful console crown and later the Xbox Series X
holding onto that crown, I do think Microsoft
have pretty much completed their apology tour
and have finally gotten the Xbox brand back to where
it was in the good old days of the Xbox 360.
The Xbox One didn't have a smooth run of it,
but it did make a lot of huge leaps forward,
which while maybe wasn't enough to save the console itself,
at the very least puts the Xbox brand as well as the Xbox
Series X in good shape going forward and it's hard to argue
with building versus giving up.
That was a really dark way to end the video.
Thank you for watching though.
Hopefully you enjoyed, make sure to subscribe for more
console content like this, as you might imagine plenty
of news and plenty of other videos like this are going
to be coming for many years to come.
As long as I keep getting Xboxes and PlayStations
to talk about.
(upbeat music)