This past week, I took on a very difficult project, one of the most intensive I have done in terms of the amount of information I needed to learn before going into it. Hacking Microsoft’s Xbox360 is no easy task. It requires incredibly precise soldering skills, a lot of patience, and a lot of time, in my case nearly 12 hours of work. The solder points on the motherboard were so small I had to use a magnifying glass to see them. This project is known as Reset Glitch Hack 3, a way to modify your Xbox360 to play backups (video game files) of your games, meaning if you do this mod, you can essentially have any game from the Xbox360 library ready to play on your console for free, and after 3 days of work, I was able to do just that.
You might be asking yourself, why do this? Why would you spend this amount of effort on something that, by the way, can be so easily done without soldering on a PlayStation 3? The games. The catalogue of truly amazing games released on the Xbox360 was such high caliber that many consider to be some of the greatest games of all time. Halo 3, Gears of War 1-3, Crackdown, Forza Horizon, Fable II & III, Alan Wake, etc. And most games that were also released on the PS3 were developed on the Xbox360 and not the PS3, because developing a game on Sony’s console was far more difficult and annoying due to it’s weird hardware. This was Microsoft’s heyday and the Xbox brand’s prime. No other Xbox console has captured the levels of success Microsoft had with the Xbox360.
The Xbox360 was a tremendous leap forward in gaming. Microsoft blew Sony out of the water releasing the Xbox360 a whole YEAR before Sony released the PS3. For the first time in history, a video game console outsold Sony’s PlayStation brand on launch. It took years for Sony to catch up to Microsoft’s Xbox360, and they never came close to Microsoft in the US market. Flashing forward to the next generation of consoles, PlayStation is back on top of the market with the PS4, nearly DOUBLING Microsoft’s sales of the Xbox One in the end. And now, with this newest generation, the PS5 blew the Xbox Series X/S out of the water nearly doubling sales again. So, what happened with Xbox? Why have they been downhill in sales ever since the Xbox360? The reason is the lack of first-party games. Games are everything for a console if that wasn’t obvious enough.
When Microsoft released the Xbox One, the entire device was formed around this idea of an entertainment hub, and this basically meant that Microsoft was focusing way more on the movies, streaming and TV show side than the gaming side. Why would you even buy a gaming console if you were going to watch Netflix? You buy a console to play the blockbusters, to play the newest AAA games that everybody is talking about, to play with your friends after work, to get immersed in a different world. Not to watch Spongebob on the TV. This focus on entertainment cost them the battle with Sony.
Another out of touch decision was one of recent development. Going forward, every new title being developed for the Xbox will also be developed for PC, essentially removing the reason to get an Xbox in the first place. Why not just get a PC?
Another bad decision would be with the Xbox360 Kinect, a device that hooks up to your Xbox to allow you to play motion control based games. The reason they did this was because they saw how big motion controls were with the Nintendo Wii and how successful it became, so they wanted to do their own version of this to generate more sales. This honestly isn’t really a bad idea. In fact, it did a lot of good things. It got more people exposed to the Xbox and helped prolong the Xbox360’s lifespan. So what was the problem? The game development industry on the Xbox360 shifted away from making flagship titles to motion-controlled games, and soon, Kinect games flooded the market. The greatest instance of this was with Rare (the game company behind Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong, and Golden Eye 007) shifting away from making their incredible console titles to developing Kinect games for the Xbox360 that failed to capture any sense of originality, like their game Kinect Sports, the rip-off of Nintendo’s Wii Sports.
This is what Microsoft could not understand, and still has trouble understanding to this day. What makes a console successful, what makes people want to buy it, and what makes people excited about your product are always the games. You need to provide games you can only get on the Xbox in order for people to want to buy it, otherwise, what is the point if the same game will be released on the PS5 or the Nintendo Switch. It’s like Microsoft have been living under a rock, occasionally coming out to buy up a game development studio like Activision/Blizzard and Bethesda only to retreat under the rock again like a little insect. They are dried up for any sense of originality in the gaming scene.
Ok, so in order for Xbox to truly become a competitor and relevant again in the modern age of gaming, what do they need to do? They need to put all of their focus on developing some truly amazing flagship titles for the Xbox, and not the PC. Original Xbox titles that are stunning, fun, enticing, and captivate you. They need to be high quality, and they need to deliver. They need to create hype, create some justification for buying their Xbox instead of a PS5. But I do not think that this will happen anytime soon, not until the next generation of Xbox. Because after all of this, Microsoft still cannot learn.
Copilot, Microsoft’s flagship AI generative service, recently released a new way to play your games: “Copilot Game Experiences”. Who wants this? Who asked for this? Why would anybody with an Xbox ever consider playing this? Where is the new incredible exclusive title that Microsoft’s many newly-purchased game studios have been developing for their system? Nothing. The game they showed here runs at 10 frames per second and is an AI version of a lackluster Xbox exclusive that failed on all fronts. What a waste of resources and of everybody’s time that should’ve been spent improving a console desperately holding on for its life.
Mark my words, there is a decent chance that there will never be another Xbox in history after this one. I believe that in order for Xbox to truly make a comeback they are going to have to reinvent themselves from the ground up. A video games first, console second approach.
I agree with your whole take that xbox needs to start making xbox exclusive games, or flagship games. Too many times, I’ve seen a video game that looks awesome on social media, like Spider-Man, and figured out it’s exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation consoles. The only thing that has kept me on xbox till now is that all of my friends use xbox and it would become a great hassle to join voice chats and whatnot if I had switched to a PS5.
I’m not a huge fan of console exclusives but it’s crazy to think about how badly they fumbled in regard to them. Think about how massive of a hit RDR2 was for PlayStation and how much money it probably made them. The fact not that Xbox isn’t making console exclusives of that quality but that they’re not even making console exclusives at ALL is crazy. I agree, they need to start putting the quality of their games first
This is a great post, but I have to be the annoying professor guy and ask about one detail–the, ahem, DATES on that Ars Technica graph. That graph represents the console industry growing up until the point where your generation first became gamers. Maybe it’s actually the starting point for a different gaming post?
I mean this has always been the problem with gaming. Often, gamer’s opinions and deepest desires are overlooked for profit and efficiency. I understand the business side of gaming, but come on. It honestly makes me upset and sad when companies prioritize profit over the gamer’s enjoyment. Enjoyment is what gaming is all about, and I fear it has begun to shift more towards profit.