The Mistake That Cost Xbox Everything

[Music] [Applause] the wait is finally over from coast to coast Gamers lined up to get their hands on this little package Halo 3 ready to talk a lot of smack online of course you have to if you don't then you're a sucker we are here at the Best Buy Theater at Times Square for the release of Gears of War 3 we're doing a midnight launch we got all the fans behind me even lying down what's up guys [Applause] Xbox in recent times has had some pretty interesting developments on one hand their Gaming revenue is up thanks to things like the Activision merger and Game Pass continuing to be a really good offering but on the other hand their hardware sales are trending downward in a pretty bad way and on top of this the recent announcement of specific games being ported to the PlayStation and switch and it seems like Xbox's long-term play as a console provider could be taking a backseat in favor of just being a game publisher a path another games company went down back in the day whose mascot is a cute blue Hedgehog now Xbox has come out and said that they are still committed to the console and Hardware space so for us on the outside we are mostly left just scratching our head as to what the strategy of Xbox truly is so far only specific sort of smaller titles and life service titles are making their way onto the other consoles but who knows what the future could hold now that the floodgates are open so while the future is up in the air for Xbox what we do know is what happened in the past though we can always argue what caused where we're at today at one point during the 7th generation it seemed like Xbox had finally carved out its spot especially in places like North and South America but as future Generations would come that spot would seem to get smaller and smaller compared to those of PlayStation and Nintendo heck even PC gaming which has grown a lot more mainstream in recent years so while we kind of know what happened with both very dumb blunders on the end of Xbox but also solid strategy by their competition one thing that I rarely see talked about is a major mistake that Xbox made and that is the lack of focus on what I think Xbox did best online play and social interactions something that I would argue that on the console space they were the market leader starting all the way back with the original Xbox console and going even stronger into that next Generation with a 360 to explain why I think this mistake basically sealed Xbox's fate as a major player years ago we do have to do a little trip back through time but before we do let's look at each console today and what they do best first we have PlayStation the PlayStation ecosystem has a fantastic collection of first party single player style games combined with a now solid online infrastructure for third party titles or even the occasional online focused Sony game like in the case of Hell divers 2 on the other side we have Nintendo who remains the king of family games and have completely carved out their own Niche off the back of their most famous IP for years but on top of that in the recent generation Nintendo was able to combine the markets of the handheld Market which they had already dominated and the standard console Market into one combined Market making this switch one of the bestselling consoles of all time something that not only do Nintendo fans buy but also people that own other consoles as it can be a great only console or a fantastic second console or console for someone who primarily plays on PC thanks to the fact that it can go mobile and then we have Xbox what does the modern Xbox the Xbox series X or S do well well they still have a pretty solid online infrastructure for both third party and first party games and they have some good first party games especially with the purchase of things like Bethesda and Activision but with all of their exclusives also coming out on PC and in some cases later on other consoles Al together the place for the Xbox console itself has kind of become pretty small ever since the eighth generation there's been that Meme that Xbox doesn't have games and while somewhat rooted in Truth XBox in recent years has done a better job than they once did but again with all of these games on PC or even coming to other consoles later on the Xbox itself has less and less of a place then in blow for blow it's hard to say the Xbox exclusives really match up to those of the likes of PlayStation and Nintendo though hopefully this year 2024 could maybe start turning that around with the likes of hellblade 2 and the Indiana Jones game and now with Activision first party Call of Duty can add on to the Xbox side you also have Fallout which is obviously blowing up recently with the TV show though unfortunately it's probably going to be a long time before we see another Fallout game but we do have the Starfield DLC coming out sometime this year so while Starfield had a little bit of a mixed reception and kind of dwindled off a bit and maybe it'll start to pick up more Fanfare and a little bit more steam over time so that's kind of where the consoles are at today let's back this up though a few console generations to the generation where Xbox had its strongest foothold and that was the seventh generation the Wii versus the 360 vers the PS3 now I do just want to point out that like any person my view is going to be a little bit skewed here as I grew up in America and Xbox was much stronger here in America than across the ocean in places like Europe or even Asia so my personal experiences here are that my personal experiences growing up as a kid though I'm sure many of you probably had similar experiences but that said what did each of these consoles do well well the Wii kind of like the switch was able to do something unique and because of this being extremely successful and in the case of the Wii it was basically a cheat code into to the family living room with its revolutionary at the time motion controls allowing games like Wii Sports to be in literally every person's house but it was also still followed up by a solid collection of amazing first- party titles like Nintendo always does this was enough to carry the Wii to an easy first place finish during that generation but the Wii did have its weak points with weird versions of games making their way onto the Wii and while the Wii did support online play it was a far shot from the other platforms who did it much better now the PS3 well just like today the PS3 excelled in single player games games like the last of us and the Uncharted series are alltime Classics and gaming but the roster on Playstation went pretty deep the PS3 also supported online play but at the start of the generation the features and just overall ecosystem of online play felt pretty far behind Xbox Live only catching up toward the end of the generation into the following generation and then there was the 360 the console literally every kid had in my high school besides the Wii this was the console to have in that 2006 to20 time frame as a core gamer and while it slowed down toward the end of the generation due in some parts to some pretty poor choices by Xbox and Playstation putting out some really solid first party titles toward the end of the generation the 360 would undoubtedly carve out a very respectable piece of the console pie the 360 was versatile while it had good third party and even some good first-party single player games or games that came to Xbox first and other platforms later the bread and butter of 360 in my opinion was Xbox Live and online play the 360 is where Xbox Live really became a cultural phenomenon in America but the roots were set in the previous generation when Xbox Live was released in 2002 for the original Xbox console at the time this feature put it Leaps and Bounds above the other consoles in terms of online functionality and it would only improve throughout the generation gaining momentum into the next when it really caught fire now obviously PC gaming at the time had just as good if not better online capability but for a console if you wanted to play online Xbox was where it was at and the reason it blew up was due to many factors obviously just plain old momentum while the functionality for Xbox Live began back in 2002 not only did it need time to improve a little bit you also needed the killer apps to really blow it up games like Halo 2 toward the end of the Xbox generation would begin building the foundation for the later 360 titles to build on internet across the world in this especially in America also just got better as technology improved in the early 2000s Broadband would begin to replace the much slower dialup and by the mid to late 2000s most homes would make the switch which meant much higher speeds and better connections to support online play and last but not least I kind of mentioned those killer apps well the 360 generation had a whole slew of them obviously games like Halo 3 led the charge here but even titles like Gears of War were huge during this generation both as a single player camp aign and a multiplayer title but obviously one of the biggest was Call of Duty which began to explode after Call of Duty 4 in 2007 and it would only continue to grow throughout the generation Cod 4 World at War MW2 blops MW3 blops 2 this six-year run by Call of Duty is something that will never be matched in Call of Duty and for all of these titles the place to play was Xbox Xbox was the online console if you wanted to play multiplayer games with your friends you bought and Xbox and if you wanted to just play cool single player games then you went with the PS3 and if you wanted a cool family console or you wanted to do some weird motion stuff then you went with the Wii this was very much the mindset of many kids growing up during this time frame in America and I can attest to that firsthand as someone who entered High School just 2 years after the drop of the 360 if you take a look back at these social media kind of waves at the time groups like Faze or Optic who led the charge on YouTube when it came to gaming where did they all play the 3 60 and this was the same with most friend groups your friends likely all played on an Xbox so if you wanted to play cod with the boys or Halo with the boys it was going to be on a 360 and if you were the unfortunate kid trying to play COD 4 on a PS3 well you got a little made fun of it wasn't just a who's on what console thing though the platforms themselves also heavily benefited from the franchises on them in both ways if you look at the most sold games on the 360 and the PS3 you will instantly notice something very interesting and that's the style of game that dominates the charts sure some games hit both charts like GTA 5 which is literally the bestselling game of all time but you see a lot of the rest of the top 10 for PlayStation and even Beyond filled with a lot more single player titles vers the 360 which is heavily dominated by multiplayer focused games or at the very least games that had a very big multiplayer component ignoring the dumb connect game that was the most selling cuz it was bundled together and the obvious GTA 5 you see games on the Xbox like Minecraft MW2 blops Halo 3 blops 2 reach gears etc etc as you go down the list and all of these games were either multiplayer focused or at the very least had very big multiplayer components you can even dive a bit deeper and look at the sales of some of these third party titles like Call of Duty across the platforms and I know it's probably a little confusing talking about Call of Duty as third party because it's not anymore but that's a very recent development and back then Activision was very much third party the bestselling Call of Duty on PlayStation 3 was MW2 with a very respectable 4.8 million copies obviously nothing to scoff at however on the Xbox not only is MW2 not the highest selling Call of Duty even that one sold almost three times the amount on the 360 now it's very important to note here that during the Seventh Generation Xbox had deals with Activision that brought things like mapa to the 361st something that we would later see flip around in the Next Generation until obviously more recently when Microsoft just straight up bought Activision it wasn't just Call of Duty though that made online on the Xbox special games like Halo 3 and even gears to a lesser extent were cultural icons for the time I mean we have all seen the Halo 3 midnight release videos and all the coverage around it it's hard to explain if you weren't around or gaming during those times but at least for people you know here in America or in North or South America Halo 3 and that run of Call of Duty games were the fortnite of their time everyone played them your friends your classmates your teachers everyone you knew these games were huge and while they all sported very good campaigns they also included very fleshed out and popular multiplayer modes that would continue to be played for years on end but even if you take Call of Duty out of the equation comparing these first-party Xbox titles like gears and Halo to the PlayStation equivalent of the time when it comes to multiplayer it's not even close sure games like the last of us or even Uncharted had some pretty cool and underrated multiplayer modes but they didn't hold a candle to the popularity and power of peak Halo and Gears of War Xbox's unique selling point was that it was the console to get if you wanted to play online games They even played into this by including a really crappy headset with the console to encourage online communication and hopping on was as easy as plugging in an ethernet cord or buying a wireless dongle if you were that unfortunate kid who had to play on Wi-Fi and that uh that unfortunate kid was me I had to play on Wi-Fi which at first I stole from my neighbor's house because my Wi-Fi didn't reach up to my room from the basement you even had these really cool social environments and games that were all built around community and online play Netflix was on the Xbox and you might not think that's anything special cuz like now you can watch Netflix on literally anything but back then as Netflix was also starting to explode having a console that you could watch Netflix on was pretty cool and Xbox took a whole step further cuz you had this cool theater setting where you and your friends avatars could all sit in the crowd and watch a movie or a TV show together then you had some of the Xbox arcade games like Doritos Crash cores or one verse 100 which were all these online social Games built around using your avatar and playing online with your friends and other people while obviously something like Dorito's crash course isn't going to sell a console the abundance of cool online features that the 360 provided with Xbox Live was unmatched at the time everything from the UI to General functionality all favored Xbox Live when it came to online play Xbox though messed up their unique selling point and Lead was online play and games that featured very popular multiplayer modes however toward the end of the generation you would start to see this come crashing down though it wasn't really until the next Generation when we saw how badly it all went wrong we all know the meme that was the connect but we do have to be honest both Xbox and Playstation wanted a piece of the motion control pi and you can't deny the success that the connect had it sold a boatload of units and I bet off sales alone it's probably considered a successful Hardware accessory for the 360 however its inclusion also had some very bad consequences is that while shortterm were beneficial to the ecosystem in the long run I think end up really hurting Xbox the Xbox One console as a whole is one of the biggest blunders when it comes to marketing from trying to pitch an online only console which is funny cuz I'm talking about how Xbox's strength is online but they went a little too far with their pitch at first making the console have DRM so you couldn't do things like buy used games and you had to connect online every so often otherwise it just didn't work to only shipping with a version that included the connect making it more expensive than the PS4 out of the gate of that generation the Xbox One got absolutely smoked but the blunders had already begun prior to those announcements and decisions and that was still during the 360 generation to satisfy all the new connect owners which like I mentioned sold a boatload Xbox tked many of their game studios to work on connect games instead of standard core games a move which at the time made sense but looking back makes the glaring XBox doesn't have game memes even worse toward the end of the Seventh Generation PlayStation had caught up thanks in big part to all-time great video games but also online functionality features catching up and most importantly Xbox just crapping the bed and really letting their foot off the pedal Xbox allowed its most important IP to slowly dwindle off over time with basically no real replacement ever coming in Halo began to fall off toward the end of the Seventh Generation with both Halo Reach and even more so Halo 4 having mixed reception followed by even worse reception to the games that came out during the eighth generation with MCC probably being one of the worst AAA launches of all time and then Halo 5 coming after it a year or so later having extremely mixed reception Xbox's other big kind of homegrown IP if you want to call it that Gears of War also begin to fall off sort of around the post Gears of War 3i time once epic games would sell the franchise to Xbox epic would move on to their own projects that were no longer console exclusives originally missing the ball a few times with games like Paragon and Unreal Tournament but eventually finding the cash cow that was fortnite Battle Royale so not only did Xbox Let its biggest hitting IP slowly fade over time with nothing coming in to replace it Sony would also swoop in with a sweetheart deal for Activision giving PlayStation players many of the perks that Xbox players had seen during that Seventh Generation this left Xbox in a horrible position it was no longer the place for online play or honestly play of any sort and if you want to see how badly the eighth generation went look at the best-selling list of Xbox One games versus the bestselling list of games on the PS4 the differences are jarring and it really led us to where we are now while the Xbox has bought up a ton of studios and Publishers to try and get more games they've still yet to have the smash hit that makes you need to buy an Xbox but even then nothing is exclusive to the Xbox anymore with all of their titles on PC day one on top of this these days most third party multiplayer games are completely crossplay and if they aren't there's probably more players on play PlayStation or PC Xbox really blundered their lead in the online realm and it's one that I truly believe cost them the console war or at the very least made the console war a lot less fun as they were no longer a head-to-head competitor with the likes of PlayStation these days Xbox seems content just being a software provider with a piece of Hardware that you can buy if you want but at one point especially during that Seventh Generation they really felt like a true hardware Contender I'd love to look at Xbox today as the multiplayer or live service platform while letting PlayStation come in with those huge budget single player titles and then have Nintendo off to the side printing their money and making sure to dmca strike random PC mods as a Pastime to keep the lawyers awake but that isn't the case Xbox isn't the anything platform other than a box to play game pass games on if you don't have a PC or in my case a console to literally just play backwards compatible games from the Seventh Generation because I'm that much of a boomer in reality though the case to buy or need an Xbox is getting smaller as time goes on and while I don't want them to stop selling consoles it doesn't seem like it would be totally out of left field if that news came out in the next 5 to 10 years Xbox should and could have continued to be the online Kings but a lack of focus and change in priorities toward the short-term sales of motion controls cost them in the long run and without ever finding new homegrown IP to replace the Fallen Kings of gears and Halo it just feels like Xbox let their place in the console space slowly dwindle for little set addressing here are two of the biggest live service online multiplayer developers today Bungie and epic games both of which work directly with Xbox back in the Seventh Generation but between epic games selling them gears and moving fully third party and then Bungie having such a bad relationship with Microsoft that they literally got out of the contract left Halo with Microsoft just to go off and create their own game which ended up becoming Destiny now obviously a lot goes into it but just imagine if one of these Studios had stayed with the Xbox ecosystem and brought their online Innovations to the Xbox platform or maybe both of them left anyways but a different first party Studio like maybe rare could have picked up that mantle a lot earlier rare currently still runs one of the bigger live service games when it comes to the Xbox platform and that's obviously sea of Thieves which also recently came to PlayStation but sea of Thieves came out of the gate pretty slow and kind of built up momentum over time but rare also spent some time making crappy connect games when they could have maybe started development on something like sea of Thieves many years earlier if it wasn't for the connect in recent times Xbox has tried to combat this with things like the purchase of Activision and other Studios but it just feels too late especially with all the Call of Duty titles still being available on Playstation regardless at least for the foreseeable future during the legal proceedings of the Xbox and Activision merger we saw the stats kind of showing how little of Call of Duty's player base even remains on Xbox a mere 8 %. now obviously that was Prem merger but nothing major has really changed on that front and unless Xbox pulls out a major strategy shift for Activision I don't really see the needle moving very much on that front and if you just back up and look through the list of most played games on Xbox as a whole well Xbox is losing the battle on its own grounds while also bringing some of their better online games like sea of Thieves to the PlayStation platform now who knows what the future holds for Xbox and I'll still be here as just a fan of video games who just wants more cool stuff to play but I do wonder what the gaming landscape would have looked like today had Xbox maintained a focus on multiplayer games and functionality instead of whatever they did for like a generation and a half these days it seems like they're really trying to go head-to-head with PlayStation with big budget single player titles Starfield red fault lamu the Indiana Jones game hellblade etc etc but what if XBox had diverted on their own and gone down their own path many years ago the gaming landscape could be totally different and maybe a lot more fresh and unique obviously who knows that's just my opinion but that's kind of where I'm at I think Xbox should have maintained that focus on online games maybe that's cuz I'm biased and I love multiplayer games and I have so much Nostalgia for those Peak Xbox titles and just Xbox Live as a whole but I do really think Xbox had a really big lead and they kind of just squandered it all I just wanted to hop in while I was editing this because some really big Xbox news just dropped and those was the shutdown of four their Studios these were Arcane Austin the developers behind prey and then more recently redfall Tango Gameworks the developers Behind The Evil Within ghostwire Tokyo and most recently Hi-Fi rush and then Alpha Dog Studios and roundhouse Studios the one that's more surprising to me is Tango Gameworks this is a studio that's really only made good games and then highi Rush was received extremely well but apparently maybe it didn't sell very well because the game was on Game Pass and many people me included just played it through that I think we're going to have to kind of wait and see how this all plays out but it does make you wonder if Game Pass is kind of screwing over some of these Studios or maybe Microsoft and Xbox are just trying to cut costs wherever they can I'm not too sure as I'm kind of editing this video but I wanted to throw it in because it is pretty big news and I think this could end up having pretty big ramifications for the future of Xbox as we wait and see how this plays out I think it's going to do it for the video if you made it to the end you're a legend I appreciate you I also want to give a big shout out to all the patrons over on patreon you guys rock if you want your name to pop up on screen like these guys go over on patreon there's some other perks you can check out and other than that I'll see you all in the next video which is probably Gears of War 2 no cover thanks again for watching and bye-bye

Channel: Arrrash

Views: 35,644

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Id: x4HlVXvG49k

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024