When did Xbox turn bad for you?

[χKai]

I had all 4 never hated a console in that gen. Ill do say that the first years of PS3 were god awful but at least the games around 2009-onward made the console worth while. If you only knew how bad the ps3 launch years were, half the games barely ran as good as on xbox 360.

My only experience with the PS3 was my best friend getting it Black Friday, along with Skyrim. We played the fuck out of it, and it was my first introduction to actually playing an Elder Scrolls game instead of just watching him play Morrowind and Oblivion all those years.

 

[Spyrone]

Around 2013-ish. After dealing with several RRoDs, seeing how underwhelming Halo 4 and Gears of War Judgement were my opinion of the brand had dropped from favorite to least favorite of that generation and then the Xbone reveal finally clinched it. Even though they walked back the used games restriction and the other egregious BS they tried it didn't matter if stuff like Dead Rising 3 and Sunset Overdrive was exclusive to Xbox at the time- if I have to go through that much BS to play those games I'm not going to do that.

 

[moonbits]

PS3 is better than Xbox, cause free multiplayer.

[leaks your personal information]
so much better

 

[JellyjamLu]

Around 2013-ish. After dealing with several RRoDs, seeing how underwhelming Halo 4 and Gears of War Judgement were my opinion of the brand had dropped from favorite to least favorite of that generation .

God I hate how accurate & right you are on this. I felt that.

 

[Questless Knight]

Around the time of xbox one I saw it started to just go downhill with 0 breaks.

 

[Dodgykebaab]

who the hell played FF11 on PS2 outside JPN? No one cause it never came over

Yes it did.

I played FFXI Online Beta a lot on the 360 though. I had the demo from the magazine first:

I made great friends on this game. I was suprised it never came to the UK on the PS2 though.

Also, you can still play on PC to this day (for free) via private servers like HorizonXI ( https://horizonxi.com/ )

If anyone wants to try a real hardcore MMORPG or just wants to see the Final Fantasy game they missed out on, it's worth a look.

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Since

 

[Tortuga]

Xbox one probably
But i hate Microsoft since 360

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

But i hate Microsoft since 360

That early?


Also the Series S/X really felt like some sort of "Xbox One point Five" type of upgrade...

 

[Danieru-Emanyueru]

Actually the Xbox one s was still fine, I don't want to be so strict now but the one x wasn't actually necessary pure waste of money.

 

[Tortuga]

That early?

Yeah i was mostly on pc and i remember how MS treated pc people like trash back in the day, compared to og xbox days

I remember how they killed legendary Ensemble studio after halo wars flopped, wow RTS exclusively for console flopped? no way!
And eventually they killed all their pc studios

Halo 2 only for vista

Horrendous regional locked GFWL when you can't even buy dlc unless you live in specific 12 countries

And overall insane obsession with exclusive and make sure none of them end up on pc and even if they do end up its going to GFWL or an awful port or both, ironic how they crawled back to pc and steam
And more

As a console i do like 360, i bought RGH one many years later and i think it's pretty good with great selection of games

 

[fbnaulin]

After ABK adquisition, and mild Starfield reception, this went very fast down the drain.

THIS IS AN XBOX marketing campaign and Forza/Gears/Halo in PlayStation was the end of the brand as we knew it.

 

[PhaseJump]

Been with them since the start, I went all-in on Games on Demand and buying digitally, have One, One X, Series hardware on multiple TVs in my house. Xbox One stayed cheap while PS4 raised prices 50 bucks on Canadians. They are my primary console platform of choice. Over a thousand games bought and installable. I preferred it over Steam when games were broken ports and janky. I have no console warrior love for brands, the Xbox ecosystem is great for what it offers, but what it offers isn't everything, or even enough.

What ruined them for me was the slow and drawn out disappointment.

Master Chief Collection was broken for half a year at launch. Every single event they put on to show off new games was Major Nelson and a crew of bullshit peddling industry weirdos sitting around kissing each other's ass over mid-tier content, or new paint on controllers I wouldn't go out to buy.

Fable Legends was cancelled and they completely blew away the studio near launching. Scalebound looked like edgelord shit that never made any sense and they kept throwing it out there with marketing. Phil Spencer took trips to Japan every year and promised more JRPGs that never happened. Late ports of games that got released already on other platforms would show up if you were lucky. Phil Spencer annually bullshitting to the media "we hear you" about wanting them to follow up stuff like Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon. Crackdown 3 was hyped up and look at what we ended up with. Halo 5 was shit, Halo Infinite was open world shit. Forza Horizon 5 brought bugs and jank to the franchise.

The One X was great, the Series S was not.

Starfield was the most boring and lifeless bullshit ever created. The only decent game Xbox released in recent years was arguably the Goldeneye N64 remaster.

Then there is this shit, which has been what I was waiting for:

I mean, what the fuck. It's been a rough 15 years giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. I honestly wish they would just spin off Xbox, or give ABK the whole department and let Bobby Kotick come in to rebrand and run it. I don't care anymore.

Without much notice, this year Microsoft completely shut down the Movies & TVs application that I used to buy stuff for Windows & Xbox. That sucked.

I stopped buying anything from them this summer. The only thing I bought was another copy of Skyrim on Switch. Their studio's developers were praising assassinations on their social media profiles, gushing like lunatics over violence, none of them snapping out of their little derangement bubbles to touch grass. I shut off Game Pass Ultimate, and then they raised it's price to be like 34 bucks + tax per month.

It's like Microsoft doesn't care, Xbox doesn't care, they don't get 3rd party Japanese games, they don't invest in 1st party Japanese games, all their internally developed games look like garbage designed for and by a committee of Reddit people. "Marketing" and sponsored influencer hype bullshit. Halo, Gears, Fable, Forza have all gotten shittier. Starfield put me to sleep. Call of Duty is a dumpster fire right now.

 

[Bomberman]

I am part of the herd that was disaffected via the Xbox one reveal. What an out of touch disaster. Don Mattrick went down as one of gaming's worst CEO's and made some legendary memes (I dont feel bad for him because he has got that fuck you money in a golden parachute).

I actually got an Xbox One S over the PS4 (I bought a PS3 superslim in late 2013 when everyone was getting the new systems because I wanted to play exclusives I missed out on).

Things were looking up for Microsoft until recently with the absurd tone deaf moves they made.

 

[Badseed Badseed]

When they forced you to use the Kinect

Though we are starting to reach Emperor Palpatine levels

 

[Diadu]

They initially lost me during the E3 when Kinect was unveiled. It really wasn't my thing and a lot of the presentations looked bad or staged. It was also clear that they didn't want to let go of it so at that point I checked out what Snoy witht he PS3 had to offer. And after a few years, THAT E3 happened, where MS decided to commit suicide on live stream.

I remember playing on a Xbox One at a friends house and that UI was awful and I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going.

I went back to Xbox a year or two after the release of the One X and stuck around since then. The UI improved, some multiplat games ran better on the One X than they did on the PS4 Pro, the backwards compatibility was neat and the mod support for Fallout 4 and Skyrim was better (compared to PS4). But they never really could rid themselves of the taint from THAT one E3.

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

When they forced you to use the Kinect

View attachment 133890

Though we are starting to reach Emperor Palpatine levels

View attachment 133893

Glad that at some point they stopped shoehorning the Kinect in the ONE.

 

[Guinea]

Xbox 1 had JSRF, and I played that game into the ground. Same with Shenmue 1 and 2, and Halo. Good times.

When I think about Xbox now, all that comes to mind is Halo and Fable. I still like those games, and I still play them every other blue moon. Xbox has some good exclusives, such as Ace Combat 6, Lost Odyssey, Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts, etc.

Xbox never really turned bad for me. I just like gaming. I will say this, though, and don't @ me:

XBox 360 had that goddamn red ring of death, and the Nintendo Switch has that goddamn stick drift. I have never had a Playstation product shit the bed on me, ever. Playstation makes the better hardware, imo.

 

[SeventhSon]

 

[Kamako]

Xbox and Xbox 360 were both superb consoles. I had more fun playing Xbox 360 and backwards compatible Xbox games than I did PS2 games, all in all. Xbox 360 was also my first time playing online (which was expensive, but still cheaper than the up-front of cost of a PS3, and waaaaay less than a half decent PC.

Then it became apparent that Xbox 360's had the red ring design fault, all but guaranteeing that the console had an expiration date. Then they marketed Kinect, and rumours started to circulate that adverts would freeze if you left the room. Then the announcement of the Xbox One got totally overshadowed by the announcement of the PS4. Jack Tretton hammered the final nails into Xbox's coffin for me, and nothing I have seen or heard since has made me hopeful or excited for an Xbox revival.

 

[iisoide]

"This is an Xbox"

Ultimately something that people really wanted (to be able to play Xbox games anywhere) created a marketing strategy that ruined Xbox tbh.

 

[MrPanda61]

The Kinect.

After that everything just went downhill.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I have never owned one, but the constant talk about them red-ringing themselves to death utterly destroyed any consumer trust I could have had, even if, by some miracle, I was able to afford them.

Then they pulled that CIA-like shit about having you online and under a camera the entire time and I was like "Haha, no -- I'm playing to escape dystopia, not to import it! It's back to DosBox for me!".

 

[KenaiPhoenix]

Half way through the 360 era, which for me was terrible since I jumped in (wink wink) around 2010 because I couldnt afford a 360.

It was around these years when the corpos realized that gaming was the next cinema and there was A TON of money in it. Gaming wasnt only for nerds and people that actually plays/enjoys games. So they did what they do best: optimize things and ruin everything.

It started with the kinect and the "Not-miis", then they ruined Xone making it everything but a gaming a console, then killed Halo, then killed Xbox by making everything on PC as well and finally even killing CoD.

I use to love the brand but now I cant stand it.

LMAO

This is just so accurate.

What makes me (at this point) laugh the most is that there where many, many high managers and stake holders meetings, where they design and make plans for their new brand new product, and in all of them the consensus was "Lets make a videogame console, that is not about playing video game, but to watch TV... a thing that also cannot do by its own because you will need a DVR or apps that we do not sell"

 

[Alarond]

View attachment 132991
Yes it did.

I played FFXI Online Beta a lot on the 360 though. I had the demo from the magazine first:

View attachment 132992

View attachment 132993

I made great friends on this game. I was suprised it never came to the UK on the PS2 though.

Don't you know? Sony was cheated in epic way by Square around 2002-2003: Sony bought a big chunk of Square in 2001 to "help" Square to survive, after the disastrous "Final Fantasy Movie" released in 2001, which destroyed the finances of the company and put them in a serious struggle.
Just few weeks/month later after that acquisition of shares, Square announced publicly (and by HUGE surprise) in early 2002, they were developing for Nintendo again (and most incredibly, they had already been developing for Nintendo during some months, in secret, using a fake company located INSIDE Square offices, with one of its workers being the "fake" owner. Literally to hide that fact from Sony during the stock purchase. The "fake" company was called simply as "Game Designers Studio" and it would later be absorbed by Square).

(yes, "Game Designers Studio", extremely original for a cover, roll eyes)

At the same time, Square began actively seeking a merger with Enix, being the President of this last company not so sure about the fusion (because the horrible financial situation of Square at that moment) but eventually accepting. That "fusion" (it was technically more like an acquisition by Enix) reduced the weight of Sony inside the shareholding of the new company A LOT, from something like 20% to about 9% or maybe less. Before that, it was even rumors of Sony buying the 40% of Square, or even more (which would have transformed Square into a real subsidiary). Sony would finally sell its participation in Square Enix like around 10 years later.

When all of that became public, Sony cancelled the release of FFXI for PS2 in Europe (they would have been the publishers there, as they were in US) as well as their support to PlayOnline, which was supposed to be the "default" (or at least, semi-official) Online service for PS2.
That's why PS2 had none "unified official Online gaming service", as Xbox had, and that's also why PlayOnline never took off, even when it was an extremely important project for Square in the turn of the millennium. PlayOnline continues to exist in the PC, today, because part of the FFXI code is embedded in PlayOnline. But any other game abandoned that online platform long ago.

Even the PC release of FFXI was in danger in Europe. After a lot of doubts about the game release in Europe, Ubisoft announced they would publish the PC version there, but eventually was Square Enix who decided to publish it, by themselves, already in late 2004, including the first 2 expansions.
SE also published that X360 version in Europe, when it was released in 2006.

Also, you can still play on PC to this day (for free) via private servers like HorizonXI ( https://horizonxi.com/ )

If anyone wants to try a real hardcore MMORPG or just wants to see the Final Fantasy game they missed out on, it's worth a look.

In fact, you can still play THE OFFICIAL version, for a monthly fee, as always.
FFXI is still alive, and got a lot of new content in PC the last 10 years. Horizon XI is a good free server, but it only have 2 of the 5 BIG expansions (including 2 new continents and the Chrystal War era, which is an expansion in the past of the original continents and cities of the game), does not have a lot of new jobs, and have no expanded main story in "Rhapsodies of Vana'diel" released during 2015-2016, and the "Voracious Resurgence" during 2020-2023 (apart from a huge amount of new zones in the "post end content" for the hardest players).
This very same year 2025, they introduced an option to change your character appearance, including sex and even race, which, by FFXI, is a HUGE event (cause races in FFXI are very different in specs, unlike what happens in FFXIV). You have to purchase that with real money, like World Transfers, but after more that 20 years of seeing the same character in some cases, was extremely welcomed for the players.