- Hey guys, this is Austin and welcome to the
ultimate Xbox comparison. - When I started here back in 2000, the most recent console
that we were all playing was Dreamcast, we got it on 9/9/99. In many ways, that was there's
a lot of special spiritual connections between the
Dreamcast and original Xbox. You know, it ran actually Windows
CE as an operating system. We had partnered with a
lot of the folks at Sega to bring a lot of that
content also to Xbox and we were learning a lot from them. - [Distorted Voice] Its thinking. - The Sega Dreamcast was the first time that a version of Windows
was found on a home console. The inclusion of Windows
CE meant that developers had options for much more advanced development tools from
the PC such as DirectX. The problem here was the Sega had their own custom development tool which in a lot of ways
actually made it much simpler for developers to take advantage
of the limited resources that were available on the Dreamcast. The titles that did take advantage of Windows CE were pretty cool though. We're talking Tomb Raider, the original Rainbow Six as
well as Resident Evil II. The Dreamcast didn't exactly
set the world on fire, however, it did plant the
seed of an idea over Microsoft to start their own console business. Despite having high profile PC exclusives such as Age of Empires as well as Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bill Gates was nervous
about the upcoming success or potential success rather
of the Sony PlayStation 2. (upbeat music) When Seamus Blackley, a
graphics programmer at Microsoft approached gates about an
idea for their own console, it was very quickly greenlit. Blackley led a small group of
people at Microsoft in 1998 to start working on the Midway Project, which fun fact was named
after the Battle of Midway with US decisively beat the
Japanese, aka console wars. - Well, there was a small group of folks that have this like big
idea that had worked on DirectX technology on the PC side and said, hey, what if
we took this technology and Microsoft had made
a bunch of PC games, so we took that technology and we built it into a plug and play kind of appliance like console for the living room. And we felt like we had the tech, we have the operating system capabilities, we had the online networking capabilities, we actually had game studio, so we had a lot of the internal
gradients to make it happen. - Other PC tech including
using an internal hard drive, something that hadn't
been done on consoles yet, as well as taking advantage
of an internet connection which would work right out of the box. In the end, Microsoft opted to load the Xbox up with a custom version of Windows 2000 for the operating system as well as running DirectX for
the actual games themselves. Now the DirectX portion of this actually is a pretty important point. So not only did this have
a ton of different names when it was being developed, but the most common one
was the DirectX Box, which of course was shortened
to Xbox, a much cleaner name. The Xbox was officially announced
at GDC in March of 2000, coincidentally about the same time that the Sony PlayStation
II went on sale in Japan. With that console quickly
looking to become a juggernaut, there was a huge uphill
battle for the Xbox to go. I mean it's sure of course you know it's Microsoft and it is huge company, but its easy to forget not
only just how difficult and expensive it is to create a console, but of course, how
expensive it is to spend all this marketing
dollars and all this stuff to get people on board to
actually buy your brand new Xbox. To combat this, Microsoft
aggressively marketed the Xbox in the run up to E3 of 2000. Now at the show there they met a developer which would end up completely changing the future of
the Xbox, it was Bungie. And very quickly they purchased
the studio for $30 million and the Xbox had its killer app. Now Bungie had been
working on Halo since 1997 and it had a very, very long lifespan to get to the point where it
actually launched on the Xbox. First of all it started out
as a real time strategy game, which then morphed into
a third person shooter and finally landed as
a first person shooter, which of course really kind
of revolutionized the genre. Now of course today Halo
is synonymous with Xbox but back in 1999, it was good
old Steve Jobs at Macworld who was showing off the
brand new Bungie title Halo. - This game is gonna ship
early next year for Bungie and this is the first time
anybody has ever seen it, its the first time they debut it, and so I'm very happy to welcome on stage Jason Jones, who is the
co founder of Bungie and the Halo Project lead,
Halo's the name of the game, and we're gonna see for
the first time Halo. - Halo was originally
going to be a Mac title, and in fact, it did
actually ship on the Mac but even though this version
was a little bit rough, you can still see a lot of
similarities between this and the final version was shipped on Xbox. Bill Gates revealed the final
Xbox design at CES in 2001 and he didn't do it alone, he had a little bit of help from The Rock. And no, not like The Rock
as we know him today, I'm talking The Rock in full character, because 2001 was a really weird time. - Good morning, and Bill Gates, you have some pretty cool
catch phrases as well. What are some of your favorite? - My favorite is probably writing hardcore C to create slick type code. (audience laughing) - The Xbox officially went on sale at midnight on November 15
2001 here in the United States and it followed up in early
2002 in other parts of the world such as Europe as well as Asia. And it didn't exactly will catch on anywhere else around the world. By the end of its lifecycle, the Xbox had only sold a
mere 450,000 units in Japan and only about 2 million in
the entire Asia Pacific region. That was a massive failure, although it did perform a
little bit better in Europe where they sold a grand total
of around 6 million Xboxes. Halo really is the reason that
they sold the Xbox at all. In the first few months of being on sale, they sold over 1 million copies of Halo, which is a lot especially
by 2001 standards. - You know, the team had a big vision and had a lot of crazy ideas, and it was just fun to
like kind of figure out how do we pull that all
off and then content. I remember when we first showed Halo for the first time at E3,
original Halo Combat Evolved, people were kind of like, I'm not sure, I mean, first person shooters really hadn't existed with a controller and mapping the keyboard
and mouse controllers to a controller was a new thing, people took a little
while to get used to it, but then as soon as we launched, it was clear that we had something special and but not only did Halo take off but then we launched Xbox
Live the next holiday, it really took off from there. (intense music) - Less than a year after release, Microsoft did give the Xbox a price cut going from $300 down to 200. Now this meant that they could better compete with the GameCube as well as hopefully
with the PlayStation 2 but it did mean that Microsoft was selling the console at loss, and at the end of the day,
no console of this generation could even come close to
the kind of sales numbers of the PlayStation 2 set down. Inside, the Xbox was very clearly the most powerful console
of this generation and that is almost
entirely due to the fact that they did opt to go for
a very PC like architecture. This uses a custom Intel Pentium III CPU clocked at 733 megahertz,
64 megabytes of DDR SRAM as well as a very customized Nvidia GPU. Now this meant this had
some real performance especially in games such
as Project Gotham Racing, as well as Halo 2, which
performed well and looked great, however, it meant the
backwards compatibility for future generations was
a little bit more difficult but we'll get into that
just a little bit later. Now the Xbox did use a DVD drive unlike the GameCube and Dreamcast, however, unlike the PlayStation 2, you had to purchase a
dongle as well as a remote to actually play any kind of DVD content. Just put a DVD in standardly, it just doesn't really do anything. So that was pretty big negative point in that you had to go buy extra stuff whereas lots of people bought
PS2s purely as DVD players. This also opened up a world of homebrew and piracy issues for the Xbox. Now Microsoft did redesign
the internal components of the Xbox a couple times to try to get around people who are cracking it, but generally speaking,
this even to this day is still a very popular emulation machine and there are even like
flash drives that you can buy that will allow you to completely
open it up for homebrew or whatever you wanna do on it. One of the more unique and controversial parts of the original Xbox was the controller it
shipped with, the Duke. Now this thing was absolutely massive. And while some people do
swear by it even to this day, for the most part, it was
a pretty major failure, especially considering that
they actually developed a secondary controller called
the S for the Japanese market which they subsequently used to ship everywhere in the world by 2002. So the Duke was cool, but
it didn't exactly last long and also, have you seen
how big this thing is? One slight advantage
of the Xbox controller is that it did introduce the
idea of a breakaway cable. Let's say your annoying roommate decides to kick your
Xbox or kick your cable, it would just attach as opposed to ripping your entire console down, which is almost as good as wireless. - Even in the color materials
design of the hardware, the cables themselves had sort of a translucent, green effect, it really tried to reflect the quality of the user experience, so, as you remember, when you
turned on the original Xbox you had this sort of rotating sphere that felt out of this world and so we really wanted the hardware to start to bridge that experience. - The real linchpin for the
Xbox's success with Xbox Live which launched in November of 2002, a full year after the console came out. Now it was always designed
with online play in mind, I mean, of course, it has
ethernet jack on the back. However, Xbox Live is
really what separated this from the rest of the
consoles of that generation. It's easy to take this
kind of stuff for granted but there's a lot of
legitimate innovations that came with Xbox Live
on the original Xbox. That ethernet jack, provided
that you had broadband internet allowed you to not only play
games with other people, but you can even download content to your hard drive for games
or you can chat via voice which we you actually had the headset. None of this stuff was
really even remotely around for some of those very, very early console gaming experiences, I mean it was all kludgy and weird, kinda like the Nintendo switches today. This was a big hit almost immediately, there were over 150,000 people who subscribed in the first week and over 50 games are available for Xbox Live by the end of 2003. Now the easiest way to tell
would be to take a look at the boxes which show
live online enabled and of course, Halo 2 is really one of the biggest sellers
of the entire Xbox system. By 2003, Microsoft was well underway working on the sequel to the Xbox, the 360 but they still had one
final game to released and of course, that was Halo 2 which came out In November of 2004. And this was an absolutely massive seller with over 8.5 million copies sold. Despite its cliffhanger ending, Halo 2 is widely regarded as one of the best games in the Halo franchise, and one of the most influential multiplayer games of all time. Just to give you a good idea
of how popular this game was, Halo two was still the most popular game on Xbox Live all the way up into 2006 when it's finally
dethroned by Gears of War. Yeah, not a bad run. It's impressive that
right out of the gate, Microsoft were able to compete
with the giants of the space such as Sega and Nintendo and Sony, but that was certainly not enough because their next fore was a, let's say, just a little bit more successful. Since the beginning of 2003, Microsoft were hard to work
on the next generation, of course, being the 360. Now in large part, this
was really kicked off when they had a huge meeting at their campus in Bellevue, Washington where over 400 game developers attended. Why they should pick up
support for the brand new Xbox. By August of 2003, Microsoft
had made the decision to go with ATI to provide the graphics on the Xbox 360 as opposed to Nvidia, who of course did provide the
GPU inside the original Xbox. Now this is largely
emblematic of the differences between the original
Xbox program and the 360. The original Xbox was largely
just made up of components that were pretty much right off
the shelf from the PC space. Now that enabled
Microsoft to get a console out into the world fairly quickly, but the downside was that it
was very expensive to produce and they really couldn't customize things and shrink things over the generations to kind of make it cheaper and cheaper. Whereas with the Xbox 360, this was designed to be fully
custom from the ground up and that made a huge difference. - It is midnight eastern time, do you know where your Xbox 360 is? Well, it's actually
probably right over there. Yes, the moment we've
been waiting for is here. Adam is down at Best Buy
in the Mojave Desert to witness the sale of
the first Xbox 360, Adam. - All right, well, the excitement level just kicked up a couple of notches. We're right here at an
impromptu Best Buy shop and all of the new Xbox
360s are being unloaded. - When the 360 launched in
the US on November 22 2005, it was an immediate smash hit. So much so in fact that a lot of people assumed that Microsoft were artificially holding back the production
to make the line seem longer, when he they were just building these things as fast as they could. And by the end of 2005, a
mere month and change later, they had sold over 1.5
million of the consoles. - I would say I am probably
most proud of the Xbox 360. I just think like the launch lineup, I think the leap from where
we went was so massive. We were the first box connected to the TV that streamed Netflix, a lot
of people don't remember that. But I remember actually working
with Netflix in early days where they were a mail order DVD business and they were looking
for digital distribution and we were like, hey, what
if we put Netflix on our Xbox and allow people to stream movies? And just the games I mean, we
talked about project offerings Call of Duty, KOTOR, Mass Effect, of course the Gears
franchise, the Halo franchise, Forza in many ways got
born in that generation. So yeah, I would say that was
probably the most special. - The 2005 launch date is important because it was a full year before the Wii as well as the PlayStation
3 is launched. Now it's easy to think
about it today as like, oh, the Xbox was a little bit better, but in reality, this was
the beginning of the HD era. (intense music) Now in 2005, yeah, there
are a few flat screen TVs and HD was just starting
to become a thing, but the 360 really was what popularized it in a lot of people's homes. Especially considering that you can get this kind of performance a full
year before the PlayStation, well, it didn't get off to a
great start for the Sony camp. The gap and release dates
meant that Microsoft had a full year to
really make sure that 360 was fully established with
essentially no competition. Now yeah, sure, there were a few games that came out for the PS3
launch like Resistance, but, by that point the 360
had a ton of great titles like Call of Duty 2,
Gears as well as Fear. Look, there's no doubt that Microsoft beating Sony to the punch
paid off in a big way, however, they also had a
slightly uncomfortable oversight, the Xbox 360 red ring of death. - The red rings of doom signal
that your Xbox 360 is fried. Microsoft hasn't specified the cause but users say the console's cooling system just can't take the heat of a lot of play. - So when the hardware would fail, the power button would light
up with three red lights which would you indicate that
you have a major, major issue. I'm sure Jimmy will do a great job of showing off what that
looks like right now. Now this wasn't necessarily for everyone, so not all Xbox has died,
but generally speaking most of the launch 360s
did not last very long. Now I will give Microsoft some credit, they did institute a three year warranty and in large part if you
had a red ring to Xbox 360, you could just ship it back
and they would swap it out. But the problem was that the 360, I don't wanna say was rushed, but there were certainly
a lot of major issues with the reliability on that first model. Now, there are a few
different reasons why, some people have speculated
that it was to do with thermal paste or maybe the solder that would kind of start
to melt after a while, but regardless, that first
360, it didn't last very long. People came up with all kinds of ridiculous remedies to fix this. I know the towel trick was big for a while and that you would turn on your 360, wrap a towel around it and I
guess the solder or something would reflow and it would
work for a little bit. A lot of times the towel trick would only get your 360 to
work for like 20 minutes, like it was just not a good solution. Even with this technical issues, the Xbox 360 launch
actually really strongly, and a large part was because
it had a good design. - The modularity thing was
really out of necessity to have an affordable product that more people could get from day one. So upgrading hard drives, adding wireless, attaching more controllers, et cetera, all of ways that we can give people choice and really get these game consoles and experiences to more people. - So the Xbox 360 came
out, there are two models, the premium which costs $400 and came with a massive
20 gigabyte hard drive as well as a wireless controller, and then there was the core model. Now this was only $300 which
made it a really good deal, and while you didn't have
a wireless controller and you didn't have a hard drive, you had to deal with memory cards, but this got a lot of people into the door because again, this was
the very first HD console, it was really exciting. And sure lots of people bought a 360 before realizing they
had to buy a hard drive or a bunch of memory
cards but that was fine. Nearly five years after
the original 360 came out, in 2010, we got this, the Xbox 360 Slim. Now not only is it significantly smaller, but it had some very key
upgrades like Wi-Fi built in. Inside, this was a very simplified version of the original 360 so not only was everything shrunk down, but they had a little bit more of a clever design with the motherboard to add the CPU and the
GPU together on one chip. And generally speaking this was not only cheaper to manufacture but in large part it was better across the board compared
to the launch 360. The Slim also came in a wide
range different configurations, special editions with
different hard drives. And this was the very first Xbox 360 that made it down to a
mere $200 price point with the four gigabyte internal drive. Really, the Slim actually
did a very good job of distilling everything
that was great about the 360 and putting it into a smaller, cheaper, more reliable package. And then Microsoft decided
to create another one. In June of 2013, we
got this the Xbox 360 E. Now this was announced at the same E3 as the original Xbox One. And while the brand new
console was super exciting, the E just wasn't. So it's not really that much
smaller than the slim Xbox 360, it doesn't really have
any additional features, in fact, has like fewer USB ports. And while I guess the
design is a little bit more reminiscent of the Xbox One, I dunno, there just really wasn't
a lot going for this guy. Now in large part, the reason
why this was so successful was that Microsoft had a huge head start going into the generation. The original Xbox really
pioneered online gaming in any kind of real cohesive way and all that came
straight over to the 360. So not only could you
move your account over but things like Party Chat
really solved multiplayer lobbies the ability to watch
Netflix with your friends, there was a lot of stuff that Xbox Live did right immediately out of the gate, whereas on the PS3 side, well, I mean PSN existed, and it was free. Another big element to the Xbox 360 success was Xbox Live Arcade. Now this doesn't sound impressive today. It was an online store
where you could purchase and download fairly cheap indie games, but this is a big deal. Back then there really
weren't a lot of indie titles that you could buy for a console. Now there were a lot of
restrictions on these games, they had to have only
200 achievement points, they had to have a demo, they only ran at 720p which to be fair was actually pretty good for the 360. But the bigger issue, especially
with the launch version, was that the games had to
be 50 megabytes or less, like smaller than a game
that runs on your phone, mostly because it needs to run on a memory card of 64 megabytes. Thankfully, that restriction
was loosened after a while and tons of great games
flourished because of it. The interface of the Xbox 360, well, it never was quite as clean as what you got on the PlayStation 3 so there were a few major revisions. First of all it launched with the blades. So this wasn't a terrible UI, you could go between
a few different blades to pick your games or videos or whatever, but when it really came into its own, is what the New Xbox Experience where you had a revolutionary
new interface with avatars. You could install games to the drive, but really my personal sweet spot was back when they finally brought out the new Metro UI to the Xbox 360. Yes, I'm sure you remember
the wonderful interface, the classic that was known
from Windows 8 and the Zune HD. Well, yep, that came to the 360. And, it was slow. The Xbox 360 controller
has easily gone down as one of the best of all time. Now when you look at it, it's actually not that big of an upgrade over what you've got with
the Xbox S controller, however it got rid of the stupid black and white buttons in
favor of actual bumpers, and realistically, this is still the standard
for not only the Xbox, but it was the standard for
the PC for over a decade. Now at this point, yes, the
Xbox One I personally do prefer, but this was way, way
ahead of the DualShock 3 as far as I'm concerned. Just like the original Xbox, the 360, well, it had
some bumps along the way was an incredibly successful console. And I think a lot of
people look back at this and think about this really
as the sort of sweet spot, the golden age of Xbox, if you will. Now, to be fair, this console generation was really good to pretty
much everyone in this space. I mean, Nintendo sold
like 100 billion Wiis, the PS3 even though it came
off to a very slow start ended up actually barely
surpassing the 360 at the end, but as far as I'm concerned, the Xbox 360 was the real
winner of this generation. Not only did it have a
bunch of amazing games like Halo 3 and Gears
of War as well as Alan Wake, but what it really did was
set the stage for gaming as we know it with huge
things such as Xbox Live. However, a few short years later, storm clouds hit the horizon as it was time for the Xbox One. The Xbox One was unveiled at E3 of 2013 and it had a rough go from the start. So first of all, it cost a
full $100 more than the PS4 and that was only the first in a series of very questionable decisions, which really made the Xbox One look bad right out of the gate. I remember I was actually there at E3 when they announced this, and man, the crowd's
reaction was not too pretty. - Now, have you ever wanted to do more than one thing at a
time when you're watching TV? Of course you have. - $500, Kinect, DRM, it looks like a VCR. Actually, that last part
was what people said. Now there were a lot of issues with the way that they
announced the Xbox One, but the biggest and by far
the most damaging was the DRM. All right, so time to gather
around and pay attention because the original policy was well, confusing to say the least. So to start out with,
if you purchased a game, whether it was on disk or digital, as soon as you put it in your Xbox, it would then be permanently
tied to your gamertag. So goodbye selling that used
copy of Modern Warfare 17 on GameStop because not gonna happen. Oh, and did I mentioned that your console had to be connected every
24 hours to the internet otherwise it wouldn't work? Yeah, that was popular,
everyone really loved that. I know Sony had a very clear video on how you can share games on the PS4. - Thanks. - And then there was the
Xbox One version of Kinect. Now this guy came with
all the launch Xbox Ones, and was a huge reason why it was a full $100 more
expensive than the PS4. On top of that, at least it based on the
initial announcement, this is going to be
mandatory for the Xbox, if you didn't have it plugged
in, it just wouldn't function and a lot of the UI was
built around Kinect. Now it wasn't all bad, there were certainly advantages to Kinect and honestly even after
it was sort of phased out, there were a lot of use for it in the PC space because
it was a great tracker, but for games, not so helpful unless you're, I dunno, into
Just Dance or something. The reaction as you might imagine was overwhelmingly negative
and Sony did everything they could to really play up
all of the strength of the PS4 which at the time were many,
many, many, many, many. To give Microsoft some credit, they did reverse a lot of these decisions before the Xbox One actually went on sale. The DRM was the first to go. So the Xbox One does still
install games to the hard drive but all you do to make them
work is just insert the disk. You take it out and you
can give it someone else, sell it, whatever the case is. On top of that, they did get rid of the requirement to use Kinect even though it was still bundled with the Xbox for a little while. But all this being said, the
damage was absolutely done and Microsoft's roughest console
generation was just beginning. The original Xbox One
launched on November 22 2013 with exactly one option, black. Well, you know what, I'll
be completely honest, I actually think that this is a still pretty decent looking console. Spec wise, the Xbox One shares an almost identical architecture
with the PlayStation 4. So they're both AMD-based, they both have a 500 gig hard drive and they both have the same eight core AMD Jaguar CPU inside. Although to give the Xbox
a little bit of credit, it is very slightly higher
clocked versus the PS4. That however is pretty much
the end of the good stuff and where the, let's call
them compromises begin. The big problem came down to graphics. Sony pretty early on committed
to using GDDR5 memory which was standard for
graphics cards at the time and delivered a ton of bandwidth at the cost of lots of money which is never good when you're
trying to build a console. With most rumors paying the PS4 at having only four gigs of RAM, Microsoft opted to go for that slower but cheaper DDR3 memory and offered the Xbox One with a full eight gigabytes of stuff. This meant that the
performance of the Xbox One was inferior to the PS4
in almost every way. Not only did it have slower memory but they had also dedicated
a large portion of their APU to that ESRAM buffer to
actually speed up the DDR3, which meant that not only
did this have slower memory but it also was more
difficult to develop for because it had that ESRAM buffer that devs had to keep in mind, and to top it all off, because
they put that in there, they didn't have enough room
for a big GPU like the PS4 did. So it was slow memory, hard to work on and it was less powerful overall. This haunts the base Xbox to this day. So where the PlayStation
4 was able to run games at a full 1080p in most cases, this guy would usually
run games at 720p or 900p. And in cases where they
were visually the same, a lot of times PS4
games just ran smoother. And all this put together meant
that it was very, very clear that the PS4 was the more powerful console and the Xbox didn't have really any technical advantage
which was meaningful. Fast forward to August of 2016
and we got the Xbox One S. As the slim version of
the original console, this was better in every single way. Not only was it way smaller
and it even included an internal power supply versus
the giant brick of the One, but on top of that it supports
a full 4K out as well as HDR. And then we have the weirdest inclusion in the Xbox One line, the Xbox One S All Digital
Edition or Xbox SAD for short. So this is literally
identical to the One S, except that they removed
that Ultra HD bluray player and knocked $50 off the price. Although the One S for the most part was actually available on sale
for less than the SAD guy, but it plays digital games. The biggest advancement for the Xbox One, however, it came with the Xbox One X. Now this was teased at E3
at 2016 as Project Scorpio and went on sale in November of 2017. - Well, I think for us, you know, it kind of brought us back
to like our original roots, and we built the original Xbox, it was the most powerful
console at the time, you know? And sometimes it's like, do you wanna be the best selling product or do you actually wanna
be the best product? And we defined ourselves as we knew the competition already had a head start, we actually wanna make the best console. And I think that's what we
deliberately did with the Xbox. I think if you look at the Xbox One X, you know, the leadership we have there being the most powerful
console kind of brought us back to what that root and
reason and foundation was, and that is our passion going forward. We wanna continue to innovate and deliver and bring the most powerful,
most capable hardware in the console space to our fans. - Priced at $500, to One X is a lot more expensive than the One S, although it's not actually
very slightly smaller, and importantly, it
delivers a lot more power and have to play a lot of
games at a true 4K resolution. The CPU was slightly
overclocked in the One X but the big difference
came down to graphics. Gone is the old DDR3 memory
and the ESRAM buffer, and in is a full 12
gigabytes of GDPR5 memory as well as a much, much bigger GPU, which really does enable 4K gaming. Now sure, the PS4 and the PS4 Pro were way better than the One but the One X definitely
took the crown back as this generation's
most powerful console. - We're always thinking of
the whole thing as the system. The controller is the thing that you hold, and you interact with the controller a lot more than the console itself cause that's kinda on your
shelf or under your TV, and so we pay a ton of focus
to the design of the controller and making sure that
we're always advancing that ergonomically, functionally. - We try not to take away
like features or things that people loved about
the older controllers. One thing you'll notice
is that the thumbsticks are still asymmetrical as
they have been over time, and that's something our fans
have told us that they love, and that's something that
we consider like a cool part of our design and we wouldn't change that. - One place that the Xbox
One has lagged behind the competition its entire
lifespan is in exclusive games. Stuff like Forza says
great year after year, Gears 4 was a good if a
little bit unconventional reboot, however, games such as Halo 5 had decent multiplayer but on top of that, we had games like Quantum
Break which really fell flat. And while the first Titanfall was a great exclusive on the Xbox One, the follow up went multi platform and didn't really perform all that well. Now, sure there are a lot
of decent indie titles, but for the most part,
there really has not been one killer app this generation on why you should actually
buy an Xbox One over PS4. Now there are some options such as the Halo Master Chief Collection, but nowadays it's a
collection of old games, but they've been broken for years, like literally, it took them
like three or four years to finally get a lot of these
multiplayer bugs figured out. So a few years ago, Microsoft
included some Xbox 360 backwards compatibility on the One. Now this is not for all
games, although this point is the vast majority of major 360 titles, and the best part is they just work. So if you have the disk,
you put into the Xbox, and it does have to re-download the game which has been recompiled for the One, but you have to pay anything. Microsoft has also brought out a selection of original Xbox games which
are playable on the One. Now this is especially
impressive considering that the original Xbox is
incredibly hard to emulate thanks to that very unusual Nvidia GPU, I mean its the reason why we really still have never had a
proper Xbox emulator. Now, all that is pure of the fact that if you're playing on an Xbox One X, you can actually get
some major improvements to performance as well as resolution. So a lot of games will run in
a nine times higher resolution which for a lot of, especially 360 games can actually scale them
to pretty much a full 4K. All of this brings us
to the latest addition to the ecosystem, Xbox Game Pass. So this is a Netflix style subscription service
which came out in 2017 and it has been majorly
overhauled since then. Look, the Xbox One launch was
a complete and total failure and it robbed Microsoft
of a lot of momentum that they had coming from the Xbox 360. When you look at this generation, it is clear that the
PlayStation 4 has won and there's a lot of
momentum in the Nintendo camp with the Switch toward the end. However, all that being said, with Microsoft being the underdogs, it's meant that they've tried really hard to make the Xbox One better, and if you look at this console today versus what came out back in 2013, there's a massive difference. Today we sit at a very
interesting time for Xbox. On one hand, lots of people
have fond memories of the 360 but on the other, as far as
they've come with the Xbox One, it certainly has not been
able to measure up to the PS4. I mean, it's not a coincidence that Xbox hasn't released official sales numbers for the One in quite a few years now. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this upcoming
console generation is a make or break for Xbox, either Scarlett does well
and is a huge success, or the Xbox brand gets absorbed into a PC and cloud based soup of disappointments. Microsoft have been
clear, this time around, they're focusing on gaming. One of the key new features will be the addition of custom SSD. Now this will be standard on
all of the Scarlett models released so far as we know, and this proves to be a huge,
huge benefit for gamers. Now this generation,
we've had a lot of memory, a lot of CPU resources, and so we've been able to have some incredibly detailed open worlds, but the problem has been
when it actually comes to load those open worlds, it takes forever on these standard slow hard drives that we have right now. I mean, Red Dead 2 feels like it takes like two minutes just
to get into the game. And mind you, once you get in, a lot of times load times aren't so bad, but I mean, it's a hugely
frustrating experience to like fast travel and wait a minute just for something to load, whereas with an SSD, instead
of waiting that minute, you might only have to
wait a of couple seconds. The reason the current generation games are so slow to load
almost entirely comes down to their very, very slow
laptop based hard drives. Now back in 2013, this made perfect sense. SSDs back then were incredibly expensive. However, today here in 2019,
SSDs are much, much cheaper. I think it's completely
reasonable for Microsoft to ship either a 500 gig or perhaps even a one terabyte SSD
standard for the Xbox without it being an
obscenely expensive console. Although it might be obscenely
expensive for other reasons, I just think the SSD is probably pretty reasonable in the
grand scheme of things. Then there's the spec. So this generation, we're looking at an absolutely
massive increase to the CPU. Now I've already gone in depth
on sort of the performance that you might be able to expect on this, you guys can check out that video, but TLDR, the next generation consoles will have significantly faster CPUs, somewhere in the neighborhood
of two to three times better on the kind of the conservative estimate. Now the graphics won't be
quite as big of a leap, mostly because the current
generation of consoles actually have solid graphics. So when you do compare to
something like the One X, we should see somewhere around
a doubling of GPU horsepower, which is certainly not nothing
but its nowhere near the same kind of jump that we saw
going from like PS3 to PS4. And in large part, that's because not only are the graphics
fairly up to date, we're also no longer
chasing the teraflop wars. A lot of the basic stuff
behind the new AMD Navi GPUs is that they're focusing less
on that raw compute number that has always been quoted as teraflops and more so on features that are specifically focused on gamers. We've got the 8K support which, good luck seeing games running at 8K, but it also does support a
full 120 frames per second, as well as variable refresh rates. Then there's also some brand
new techs such as ray tracing, which will be up and running
on the brand new Xbox Scarlett. Now this is something we actually know a little bit less about. So they've talked about it, however, AMD has kept their
cards pretty close to the chest. So really, the only good
example of ray tracing we have right now is what Nvidia is doing on the PC space with the RTX line. Now, if you're not familiar, ray tracing is actually
fairly straightforward. It allows light in game to act pretty much like light act in real life,
it can bounce, it can scatter, as opposed to a lot of current games which require a lot of,
shall we say workarounds, to actually get things to look decent. Ray tracing does a lot
of that work for you, or at least gives you the tools to. Now the really cool part about this is that when you look at
games such as Metro Exodus as well as Battlefield, you can see early glimpse of what RTX and ray tracing will allow you to do but as this becomes more and more standard across the next generation of consoles, it should mean that this is going to be coming to everyone, right? If you take all of this and combine it with a lot of these smart moves that Microsoft has been making lately, including supporting not
only original Xbox games, but also the 360 and the
Xbox One on the Scarlett, and on top of that, the
Scarlett should also support most Xbox One accessories
like the Elite controller, although maybe not Kinect, that might not actually make the cut. So Microsoft has huge ambitions for their xCloud streaming service, which will allow you to play Xbox games pretty much anywhere, perhaps even with a small little streaming Xbox of their own. Now, to be fair, Sony has access to a lot of these building blocks
especially on the hardware side, however, it does seem at
least from the outside, like Microsoft is executing better. They've made tons of smart decisions over the last few years with the Xbox One, all which is pretty much
rolling into Scarlett, and especially considering that Microsoft is putting their giant piles of cash to work by purchasing a lot of studios, it does seem like the Xbox Scarlett should be launching at
a much better position than the Xbox One ever was in. All I can is this, going into 2020, we're in store for an
incredibly interesting console war between the
PS5, the Xbox Scarlett, and especially considering the Nintendo hasn't even started talking about what they're doing next generation, I'm really, really amped, it's a very, very good time to be a gamer. (soft music)
