ArugulaZ
Fearful asymmetry
So it seems production of the Xbox One quietly ended in 2020... and Kotaku's editors have been taking turns relieving themselves on its grave. Look, I'm not going to pretend that the system didn't have problems. We all saw the grim direction Don Mattrick wanted to take the Xbox One. Those of us who owned the system groused about the slow interface and the lack of a share button and the games that should have been ported to it but instead went straight to the Playstation 4.
The thing is, though, many of these problems were fixed. The Xbox One of 2013 is not the same as the Xbox One of today, and that has a lot to do with Microsoft's dedication to fixing past errors, even when it was abundantly clear that the One was going to trail behind the PS4 for the rest of its life. They improved the GUI so the cursor didn't take two or three seconds to jump to the next game in your library, they did away with the Kinect surveillance and limitations on used game sharing, they introduced a controller with a share button, they gave us backward compatibility on a massive scale... that's a lot of effort and money invested in righting a sinking ship.
Past console manufacturers (read: Sega) would have just scuttled their machines at the first sign of financial danger and released a new, equally doomed system two years later, but Microsoft did right by its customers and transformed what could have been a crap console into something that was genuinely worth playing, and keeping. Hell, I prefer the Xbox One to the Playstation 4, and 98% of the reason is because Microsoft stuck with it, improving the overall experience and broadening its library with backward compatibility. For those reasons, I think the Xbox One deserves better than the golden showers Kotaku has been giving it.
(I know, this is the Xbox Series thread, but I'm posting this here because I couldn't find an Xbox One dedicated thread. Also, my investment in the Xbox One ecosystem will likely lead me to buy a Series in a few years, when the prices drop. Why start over with the PS5 when I can have a full library from the moment I buy a Series?)
The thing is, though, many of these problems were fixed. The Xbox One of 2013 is not the same as the Xbox One of today, and that has a lot to do with Microsoft's dedication to fixing past errors, even when it was abundantly clear that the One was going to trail behind the PS4 for the rest of its life. They improved the GUI so the cursor didn't take two or three seconds to jump to the next game in your library, they did away with the Kinect surveillance and limitations on used game sharing, they introduced a controller with a share button, they gave us backward compatibility on a massive scale... that's a lot of effort and money invested in righting a sinking ship.
Past console manufacturers (read: Sega) would have just scuttled their machines at the first sign of financial danger and released a new, equally doomed system two years later, but Microsoft did right by its customers and transformed what could have been a crap console into something that was genuinely worth playing, and keeping. Hell, I prefer the Xbox One to the Playstation 4, and 98% of the reason is because Microsoft stuck with it, improving the overall experience and broadening its library with backward compatibility. For those reasons, I think the Xbox One deserves better than the golden showers Kotaku has been giving it.
(I know, this is the Xbox Series thread, but I'm posting this here because I couldn't find an Xbox One dedicated thread. Also, my investment in the Xbox One ecosystem will likely lead me to buy a Series in a few years, when the prices drop. Why start over with the PS5 when I can have a full library from the moment I buy a Series?)