I honestly had high hopes for the Xbox Series X (and saw the huge potential in its cheaper sibling, the Series S, despite cries from certain quarters about how it was going to hold back game development), a console from a Microsoft that had learned from the failures of the Xbox One, buoyed by a raft of game studios being given the freedom to make games they wanted to make. Perhaps the fact that the Series consoles launched without a single exclusive (there were plenty of enhanced games from the previous generation from Xbox) should have alarmed me more, but I felt pretty good about the launch even if it didn't feel especially new.
Game Pass, of course, played a large part in the fun. Unless you're very lucky, a new console and a game (maybe two) is a fairly typical launch experience. It's an expensive business, so decisions have to be made over which games you're experiencing a new generation with. With Game Pass my Series X had access to the likes of Forza Horizon 4 and Gears 5 enhanced, plus Tetris Effect and loads of older games. Halo Infinite had missed the launch window quite spectacularly (and would eventually disappoint against expectations a year later), but next-gen was here and I was raring to go.
Five years on from that optimism it's hard to think of much to say about Xbox and the Series consoles that hasn't already been written about and discussed ad nauseum, most of it negative. In short, sentiment around the Xbox brand feels like it's at an all time low, the result of the division's parent, Microsoft, enacting a litany of layoffs and project cancelations, first-party games releasing on rival platforms such as PS5, and a technological involvement in Israel's occupation of Gaza and killing of Palestinians that resulted in a call to boycott Xbox.
Add to this a rise in price of Xbox consoles, meaning the Series X and S both cost more today than at launch, and a hike to Game Pass Ultimate's monthly cost, and it's easy to see why more and more people are wondering why they should bother with Xbox at all. The Xbox is part of some of my fondest gaming memories, the 360 potentially being my favourite console of all time, yet even I wonder if it's time to just move on. Much of what I loved about the brand in the early days (Halo, PGR, Rare, Lionhead, to roll off the first to mind) is either gone or a shadow of what it was.
At various points over the last eight years or so, ever since the release of the Xbox One X (a console so good I was genuinely sad to put it away when the Series X arrived) I've felt that Xbox wasn't getting what it deserved, whether it be recognition of the quality of its games, buy-in to the continued excellence of Game Pass (at least in consumer value terms), or acknowledgement that its services were often way ahead of the competition. With strong hardware and finally a more frequent rollout of big releases (thanks to those acquisitions), a way for Xbox to truly challenge PlayStation for the first time since the Xbox 360 looked like it could be on the cards. Then we somehow ended up here, years of work to reach a point that perhaps only the financial might of Microsoft could possibly achieve, only to exit that battle completely.
Consoles, for good and bad, have always tapped into our urge to take sides. You like that, but I like this more, so you are wrong and I am right. Your thing might be good, but my thing is better, so suck it. Not to that extreme, but at points over the last 25 years I've felt varying degrees of that. It's all gone now. For all Xbox's talk of a new upcoming generation of hardware, it's hard not to think of the division like I think of EA or Ubisoft, or any other firm that purely publishes video games. Microsoft likely doesn't care, its finances no longer stifled by only being able to serve a small portion of the gaming userbase, but here, five years on from the launch of the Xbox Series X and S, my connection to the brand is disappearing fast, and I'm not sure there's any way back.
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