How Microsoft & XBOX Ruined Gaming

In 2001 the original Xbox was released to the world and a turning point was reached for the entire gaming sphere. Competing fiercely with the previous year’s PlayStation 2 and releasing almost simultaneously with Nintendo’s Gamecube, Microsoft had their work cut out for them, especially as the only American company to produce a major console since the Atari Jaguar in 1993. If you believe the old saying that “competition breeds innovation,” you might believe that Microsoft did the industry a massive favour and fuelled a golden age of gaming, echoing all the way to the present day...but I don’t believe in dumb sayings like that.

One thing about Japanese culture that I admire, is that competition whilst not necessarily being seen as a bad thing, is held in lower regard than collaboration. Big businesses in Japan will often come together for joint promotions or share innovative ideas amongst themselves. Microsoft on the other hand is an American company, and if there’s one thing we know about Americans as a society it's that they have to either be the first, or the best. Xbox couldn’t really be the first console for obvious reasons but it could be the best and through sheer power in technical specs, it was.

…but Microsoft’s problem as a new entry to the gaming sphere was twofold: brand recognition and games. Almost every one of my generation and up was intimately familiar with either sony, Nintendo or both but as for Microsoft, we just knew them as the company that made extremely boring office software. Many older people did not even have IT as a compulsory subject in school. So Microsoft was low on street cred, and on top of that, gaming was yet to become the universal medium it is today, it was still the realm of “nerds” or “geeks” or as the bullies at my school liked to call it “gay.” Some of them might have played a game like Fifa but wouldn’t be caught dead with something akin to Assassin’s creed. Nowadays you can’t set foot in a game shop without a couple of chavs talking across the way about how the new Assassin’s Creed is “so fuckin’ banging cos the map is like, even bigger than the last game innit?” but I digress. The point is, in 2001 there was a massive, untapped audience that had not yet discovered the beauty of games, and oh boy were they the kind of people to be susceptible to advertising.

So I went digging for articles covering Microsoft and Sony's advertisement expenditure and found that overwhelmingly Microsoft had spent more than its two competitors. This ranged from 50% to multiple times more than Sony throughout the XBOX and 360 eras. There have been a few select years such as 2014 where Sony has spent more, and also they are pushing the PS5 ads to the extreme (they have to, there are no games for the system) but these Sony spending sprees are few and far between. In addition, if there’s one thing Microsoft has over its rivals, it’s stacks and stacks of cash. In 2019 Microsoft reported profits of 126 billion dollars compared to Sony’s 643 million. Let’s not forget that the PlayStation accounts for around 78% of Sony’s profits, the rest of their branches barely break even at the best of times despite Sony’s massive, consistent push towards innovation in tech, not to mention they have always put 6% of their profit straight back into R&D. So with the launch of the original Xbox, Microsoft did exactly what you would expect of a giant American corporation, it threw so much money around on advertisements it practically erased Playstation from existence as far as the media were concerned. I don’t even need to refer to statistics on this, I remember vividly. An ad break would interrupt my daily dose of Kenan & Kel or Sabrina the Teenage Witch, telling of the new game hitting the shelves soon, the box in the corner showing the Xbox version of the game at the very front with PlayStation hidden behind, sometimes absent from the ad altogether. Then the Xbox logo and tagline would proudly show at the end of the ad just in case people weren’t getting it: you want to play this on Xbox and it might just be the only way to play.

So alongside this systematic attack on PlayStation, Microsoft had seduced a new generation of gamers to the scene with their advertising campaigns, but the kind of people that would be susceptible to this advertising would also need flashy, bangy actiony things to keep up with their short attention spans. This led to Halo, Xbox live and the beginning of a video game trend that is still raging to this day. The online shooter had just entered the mainstream of gaming. No longer the realm of the computer nerd playing doom or quake on PC over LAN, but an accessible, near-instant portal into a world where everyone made “the right decision” Microsoft was banking on with their huge ad campaign. To buy into this Xbox echo chamber.

Journalists kept the big companies sweet in order to maintain their primary revenue sources in advertising and in fear of being blacklisted by companies offering review copies and other goodies. But it goes far deeper than just a bit of corruption for some positive coverage and advertising monopoly, this got so out of hand that it seemed to change the culture of gaming and games journalism as a whole. By the time of the Xbox 360, it was practically assumed by most in the industry that Xbox was the default way to play. Games started being developed with Xbox in mind first and foremost, then ported to the PS3 after the fact. The worst outcomes of this system were games like Skyrim, the PS3 version of which remains completely broken to this day, it constantly freezes making you need to hard reset your PS3.

Yet even when multiplatform games ran perfectly well on PS3, the increasing social pressure from the main user base of places like Gamespot and IGN caused an echo chamber to form around the very idea that Xbox was the superior console for game development. The best example of this is The Orange Box, a compilation of Portal, Team Fortress and most importantly Half-Life 2. It’s a game I was hesitant to buy for years due to reviews of the game ubiquitously claiming that the PS3 version suffered from constant frame rate issues and bugs and that the Xbox version was of course superior in every respect. Now, unless I am the luckiest Half-Life fan in the universe, this was complete slander and should have been met with legal action in a just world because guess what? I played the Orange Box on PS3 and it ran flawlessly from start to finish with not a single bug encountered...apart from the antlions of course.

Playstation recently came under fire for withholding Spiderman from the roster of the multiplatform Marvel game from Square Enix. The game looks awful generally so I don't really care but the point is that this kind of thing was started by Microsoft. Final Fantasy didn't get bought by SONY like people tend to claim. The developers of Final Fantasy VII knew that the N64 just wasn't going to cut it so the way to bring their vision to life was only through PlayStation. Not so with Sonic 06 or Tomb Raider Underworld, which remained multi-platform but the former having reports of Microsoft rushing the timed exclusive for a holiday release in one of the most notoriously buggy and unfinished states gaming has seen. The latter, already an extremely short game, with plenty of bugs and scrapped features that were promised pre-release, had an entire story segment, integral to explaining a key plot point, that could only be downloaded as DLC on the XBOX 360. I will probably never get to play this segment now as I'm sure it will be taken off the store as the 360 moves into the realm of retro gaming.

Perhaps, like me, you’re more interested in retro gaming than anything XBOX or Playstation are putting out nowadays. The diminishing returns of high-fidelity graphics have done little to convince me that the PS5 and XBOX…the new one, have nothing to offer regarding innovative gameplay. Any current-gen game could have been played on previous-gen consoles with no difference to the enjoyability of the game itself, they just look very slightly more pretty. But an argument can be made too that this need for new console generations was borne of the constant debate over which console is “more powerful” and before Microsoft entered the gaming sphere, the games were what was most important. After all, the Gamecube was more powerful than the PS2 and Dreamcast more than the PS1, with a better graphics card than the PS2 to boot, but Playstation still came out on top in both cases. As I’ve covered in my Playstation Magazine videos, developers and publishers alike believed in the power of the Playstation, they didn’t need to be bought and the money was being reinvested constantly in the Playstation ecosystem, not pissed away on advertising.

Even as a retro game collector, Microsoft’s bad business practices can be felt. You’ve probably seen the ‘Games for Windows Live’ logo on PC games released between 2007 and 2014. These are physical games with an always-online requirement tied to Windows Live, a now-defunct service. Microsoft essentially robbed users access to millions of pounds worth of software they had purchased and made millions of tonnes worth of plastic utterly useless to anyone except those who might appreciate having game boxes on their shelves solely for the box art. People worry today that eventually, Steam may go offline and everyone will lose access to their games, well, it already happened with Microsoft's online service so the fears are well-founded.

You may believe that Microsoft innovated the online gaming space through their Xbox live service. I believe this was only a case of Xbox live being the more popular service that came at a time when gaming came to the mainstream. You could say the PlayStation 1 did this for gaming depending on your perspective, but Xbox Live was certainly the thing that brought online gaming into the limelight. With it, came DLC, day-one patches, tacked-on multiplayer modes for single-player games that had no business having them and so much more that would plague the industry for years to come. Meanwhile, Playstation offered a completely fine online experience, at no charge, until they lost me completely to PC gaming with their now-mandatory PS Plus online pass. Innovation though? We'd have to forget about the PS2 and Dreamcast addons allowing online play in games like Metal Gear Solid 3, Timesplitters, and Phantasy Star. Once the PS3 came along, I spent more time using it to play MGS3 Online than any other multiplayer game on that system.

Advertising has remained Microsoft's one and only fallback. It’s only recently they have started investing huge sums of money, not in creating their own new studios to take advantage of Xbox hardware to its fullest but simply purchasing well-known studios outright in the hopes they can entice players to buy into the Xbox ecosystem. So far this has not gone well for one of my prior favourite studios Ninja Theory. Xbox promised upon their acquisition that they loved the studio’s output and that Ninja Theory would be free to create whatever they wanted with an unlimited budget to boot. As the studio is known for its story-driven games that push the boundaries of game design tech like motion capture and sound design, I somehow doubt that “whatever game they wanted to make” was a MOBA game attempting to compete with the likes of Overwatch, almost guaranteed to fail in such an insanely saturated market. Also worth noting, this game came out extremely quickly after a time when Xbox was being heavily criticised for having basically no exclusive games coming out since they cancelled several staple & high profile games like Fable and Scalebound. I also didn’t see much in the way of advertising from this purported unlimited budget they promised Ninja Theory.

If I were to sum up why I don't find Xbox that interesting, I think the outright lack of innovation. They have coasted on being the system that people use to play Call of Duty for most of their formative years. The series itself has stagnated for years, offering nothing new to its fans besides a new selection of predatory microtransactions. XBOX has driven the few exclusives they have into the ground by putting more funding into buying up studios and advertising, as shown by the shocking production values of the new Halo when compared to anything Sony studios offer. Time and time again they have failed to innovate and show me the kinds of gameplay, not just graphics, that their studios are capable of creating. In the end, the gameplay is what matters and if Xbox ever delivers the "next-gen" promise that we keep getting fed, I will be there to cheer them on.