I bought the first Xbox on Day 1. My first run of the Halo campaign was in co-op with a buddy of mine who was out on the West Coast over Thanksgiving. Bought the 360 right before moving and took it on the road with me. Bought a little 20″ Polaroid 1080i TV so I could play in my apartment while I waited for my stuff to be delivered. On the launch of the Scorpio, I had three launch day units because I’d ordered from 2 different vendors on Amazon, and another one from Best Buy. I’ve had a Series S and a Series X. PC has been my preferred platform overall for almost 30 years, but Xbox was my preferred console for gens 6, 7, and 8.
As a kid, and before I was multiplat, I was Sega. Had the Master System, Genesis, Saturn, & Dreamcast. I lived through their exit of HW. I lived through the vanishing of the gaming market in North America from 1983 – 1985. I’ve seen Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision, Magnavox, Neo Geo, 3DO, TurboGrafx, Phillips CD-i, and probably others come & go.
I’ve spent money on Xbox for almost 3 decades. But Xbox is responsible for making Xbox go. And since 2020, they have tried to make Xbox go on influencers and content creators and a lot of distraction rounds & decoys and it has not changed with this new regime. If Xbox had raised Game Pass Ultimate to $30, dropped it to $23, paywalled Day & Date, and pulled CoD, I would have said the same thing about it I do when PlayStation does stuff. “That’s just business and consumers will decide if it is acceptable or not”.
But they tried a lot of smoke & mirrors and fired a lot of decoy & distraction rounds in doing all of that, which is what the past 6 years have been. I have umbrage because Xbox has been on this pogrom of pandering, placation, and appeasement. Trying to play the good-guy routine in order to get a pass on its deliverables. PlayStation and other vendors tend to just say “This is the product, here is my price” and listen to how the market responds or doesn’t with money. It’s not a reality TV show like it is with Xbox.
I do not care about Game Pass, Play Anywhere, This is an Xbox / Everything is an Xbox, Cloud, Smart Buy, Cross Buy, Velocity Architecture, Xbox FanFest, FanFest World Tour, logos and boot-up screens. Because what goes hand-in-hand with that is all of the “exclusives are antiquated”, now “we need exclusives”, “you might need to upgrade your PC” to play Starfield, “Redfall is a miss but we’re seeing good engagement in Game Pass so how big a miss is it?” and other Greatest Hits of their PR and marketing. IMO Xbox needs to STFU and focus on providing me great games, and I have not played a Great Xbox game since last gen. I loved Avowed, and South of Midnight, but those things did not shake the earth.
Fable is the first thing of that ilk IMO in a long time. I am not here for XBox stuff that they have been doing for 2.5 decades re-dressed. Zero interest in Gears E-Day. Zero interest in Halo: Combat Evolved. I’ve played that campaign a half-dozen times.
For me they need to move the needle and the art forward. I only care about exclusives if they allow teams to code close to the metal, keep the dev cycle tight and minimize defects, extract the max from the singular HW set, & use the spare capacity to move the art & design forward. And focus on great performances. I, personally, do not see that in E-Day. Or Combat Evolved.
You have Ashley Johnson moving everyone to tears on the Naughty Dog set, making everyone have to take ten after the Joel scene on the mocap set for TLOU2. That’s what I am looking for from Xbox. They have the resources. There is no excuse.
Rounding Off Infinity 