- 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. Before we continue, I have
to give a huge shout out to LastPass for sponsoring
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definitely be sure to head to the link in the description
to check out LastPass, and again, huge shout out
to LastPass for not only keeping me safe, but
importantly also sponsoring 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)
