To allow players to still enjoy their own digital games on a friend’s Xbox One, Microsoft decided that every console would need to be perpetually monitored via an internet connection to Microsoft’s servers to confirm that the person logged in had legal ownership of the intangible games.
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Take, for example, the presentation’s emphasis on Xbox One owners amassing massive libraries of digital games rather than bookshelves full of boxes and discs. Or, to phrase it another way, where Microsoft had seen features, fans saw flaws. As they saw it, Microsoft intended to control how players bought, shared, and played their video games. Many of them despised the very philosophy of the Xbox One. So many brand partnerships.įans were furious, and not just about the lack of video games. The hourlong presentation is infamous, best remembered for focusing on practically anything but video games: apps, Skype, the NFL, the future of television, and brand partnerships. Sales of downloadable video games were climbing, high-speed broadband was more available than ever before, and Microsoft had a console that was conceptualized for this precise moment. Players would have access to everything they could imagine, so long as it could enter their home via Wi-Fi. The console would ship with a disc drive, but the marketing emphasized internet connectivity and cloud computing, making it clear that the Xbox One would be a digital-first machine. It would feed us our games, but also our films, live television, sports scores, and social media. Their rectangular black slab would become the centerpiece of our living rooms. They’d bestow upon the world a video game console that transcended video games, becoming something more ambitious and more profitable. This was 2013, a different time, and the band of execs were riding the high of the Xbox 360, a gargantuan success that had helped to popularize online multiplayer, downloadable indie games, and streaming video services.įor the Xbox One, Microsoft’s designers and executives envisioned something even bigger. The Xbox brand is in such an awkward spot in 2020 that it’s a challenge to remember the overconfidence of Microsoft’s leadership team on the eve of the Xbox One. It would be critical negligence, ignoring the unfortunate confluence of ambition, creative freedom, critical expectations, and fan entitlement that comes with the conclusion of something that’s been a meaningful part of people’s lives - for some, from childhood into early adulthood. To critique the Xbox One without including its predecessors would be like analyzing The Godfather Part III without mentioning The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. The future of Xbox will take a different approach to the brand, a creative reboot of sorts of the very assumptions of how we play, buy, sell, and share our experience with video games. Then, like so many trilogy endings, the Xbox One struggled to find balance between expectation and ambition.Īnd like a trilogy, these three consoles will be remembered not only as individuals but as a unit. The Xbox 360 established the tech company as a legitimate competitor. The original Xbox introduced Microsoft to the gaming world. The trilogy is a useful template for Microsoft’s video game consoles. By the third entry, a project is established, and the audience expects both more of the same and also that spark of newness that originally attracted them to the series. Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, the Wachowski sisters, David Fincher. Even the most talented creators struggle to end a trilogy.
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