Current Events > So is the Xbone launch event the worst gaming blunder in history?

(+) Yeah! (+)

The funny thing to me is, near 9 years later, that they could have an identical event today and likely not receive nearly as bad of a reception. It'd still be bad but the ubiquitousness of the internet now would make some of the selling points easier to swallow

Sega revealed the Saturn the exact same day it got put in stores, without ever telling retailers it was a thing until suddenly they had large stocks of a system no one knew existed.

Eh, it was still pretty successful.

Id say launching the Series X and a year later there not being enough stock to be worse.

The_Creep_2020 posted...

Eh, it was still pretty successful.

Id say launching the Series X and a year later there not being enough stock to be worse.

Yeah but that's less of a self inflicted blunder and more of a victim of circumstance.

Otherwise you could say the same thing about the PS5

Worst gaming blunders would be ones that closed the company, no?

Or else, companies that passed on publishing a game that then became like, the defining game of some genre and made tons of money.

E3 2013 was almost a carbon copy of the E3 where Sony upstaged Sega, and I remember thinking that was exactly what Sony was going to do right after MS announced the Xbone price.

Maybe top 10 but its not the worst ever, when stuff like OnLive, Ouya and Intellivision Amico exist.

Sega Saturn's launch will forever be the largest console related blunder of all time. It practically killed an entire section of the "console war" because the result was trying to go for a do-over with the Dreamcast... which also came out at an awkward time.

The ps4 vs xbone pre-release battle was so fun. Xbone failed at literally every aspect. Stupid mandatory kinesthetic. Stupid no used games or whatever.

Not sure if ever, but it's in the top 3 as far as launches go

You forgot the N-Gage, didn't you?

Antifar posted...

You forgot the N-Gage, didn't you?

Oh wow now that is some ancient history youre digging up.

I still remember how awful that one QuickTime event game looked, and the whole "no used games, assholes" bit.

ahem, cyberpunk

Phantom_Nook posted...

I still remember how awful that one QuickTime event game looked, and the whole "no used games, assholes" bit.

The interview with Don Mattrick where he told consumers to play 360 if they didn't like it was so uncomfortable. Geoff Keighley got heated

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Nobody cared even when it was announced. People were more concerned with the upcoming N64 announcement.

As someone who got a 32x at launch, Im still pretty bitter over that one.

Xbox was permanently tainted by that. It's gotta be up there.
Allowing Sony to win the generation was a catastrophic result too considering their console was just as bad.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Allowing Sony to win the generation was a catastrophic result too considering their console was just as bad.

???

PS4 is one of the best of all time, tho

Gobstoppers12 posted...

???

PS4 is one of the best of all time, tho

If you like interactive movies, day one patches, generic battle royales and splitting hairs to argue with the Xbox people over graphics maybe.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

splitting hairs to argue with the Xbox people over graphics maybe.

Lol now I get it. Sorry, I should have realized which position you were coming from. I'll disregard = )

Gobstoppers12 posted...

Lol now I get it. Sorry, I should have realized which position you were coming from. I'll disregard = )

Well it's not Nintendo and if it's PC it's tenuous at best. That video game generation we just collectively crawled through was miserable.

It's certainly up there along with the Sega Saturn and Wii U.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

That video game generation we just collectively crawled through was miserable.

I disagree.

599 US dollars

ET almost killed the gaming industry and Atari went from being the leading console manufacturer to a nostalgia brand.

TheHoldSteady posted...

ET almost killed the gaming industry and Atari went from being the leading console manufacturer to a nostalgia brand.

It's still crazy that they actually found the burial site all those years later. So many people thought it was an urban legend, lol

Gobstoppers12 posted...

I disagree.

Well yes, evidently you do.
You just wrote me off because I'm not a graphics over gameplay. Miserable stuff.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

It's still crazy that they actually found the burial site all those years later. So many people thought it was an urban legend, lol

im lost, whats the story behind this?

Biofighter55 posted...

im lost, whats the story behind this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

ViewtifulJoe posted...

You just wrote me off because I'm not a graphics over gameplay. Miserable stuff.

No, I wrote you off because you completely ignored all the positive aspects of the PS4 and its generation of games lol.

I mean shit, Spider-Man alone makes a PS4 worth owning, imo.

I disagree that this can't be a blunder because the Xbone was still successful, because its eventual success was at the expense of what made the Xbone reveal so dogshit.

You had to have a camera hooked up to your console all the time, your console had to be connected to the internet for you to use it, and physical game discs were one-time purchase keys that became bound to your console. The most pervasive thing out of all that is the online requirements - the NSO game collections work on a similar principle, for example. But the Kinect was a fucking terrible idea, because A) it was an external peripheral that had to be plugged in, meaning that if it was damaged in some way you would be fucked out of using your $400 game console because necessary features would become locked off, and B) the combination of "necessary camera peripheral" and "always online connection" garnered a lot of criticism over surveillance. And as evidenced by the final product not having any of this, this wasn't a hardware limitation - there was no physical reason why a Kinect was physically necessary to use the console. They developed software that hamstrung the console based on a bunch of restrictive, anti-consumer protocols, and they sold it as a necessary and inevitable future.

And nothing sums up the petty, short-sighted, anti-consumer greed like single-use game activation discs - game discs that didn't contain the game and would install the game from an online server (which unfortunately did become a standard), but which would also become locked to your Xbox profile or console. So if you got sick of the game and wanted to sell it, or if you wanted to let a friend borrow it? You couldn't. The second you put it in your Xbox One, the second you used it, it became useless to every other person on the planet - like a condom. It would only ever work with your profile or console.

They tried to kill the secondhand game market (which is already a pretty volatile niche, as seen with GameStop and their shift towards nerd culture merchandise) as a way of potentially shifting more units, but which made gaming as a whole unnecessarily restrictive for the everyman who doesn't hoard this nerd shit and who can't drop hundreds of dollars on retail-priced game releases every year.

It made physical games obsolete not by offering a better solution, but by hobbling the physical medium artificially to force more financial engagement from the market. The Xbox One launch was the biggest load of horseshit of its time, and it was a low point for gaming.

With that being said: I would refer to the Xbone launch as one of the most significant, high profile blunders in recent history. Because if we're talking about all of history, the Xbone has to contend with the Atari Jaguar. It has to contend with the failure of the Saturn and Dreamcast, which had their strong suits but which bled so much money that they ended a prominent game company's hardware division. It has to contend with the Virtual Boy. Let's face it, the world of gaming have seen worse flops - the N-gage and the Ouya, even.

What I think makes the Xbox One debacle so bad is how unnecessary, scummy and hostile it was. None of it was necessary. The Kinect didn't need to be there, they didn't have to hobble functionality based on internet access and they didn't have to make game discs as useless as they were already shaping up to be. And there was no physical reason for any of this - it was all dependent on hardware. Microsoft just wanted that level of control. And Sony had a field day with it, releasing the most smug, shitposty video about how to share your PS4 games with friends - it was one guy handing his copy of the game to another guy. It was a slam dunk.

The Xbone launch wasn't a disaster on the level of the Ouya. Though frankly? If Microsoft had charged headlong into this horseshit without changing something, it could have been the most high profile disaster in the gaming industry to date and it could have sunk the Xbox brand. Microsoft would have continued, sure. But this could have been the final nail in the coffin for the Xbox, which had a ridiculously low market share in Japan for all of its iterations and which ultimately did the worst business in its first two outings.

Firing the dumb fuck who oversaw the Xbox One development cycle and replacing him with Phil Spencer is what got the Xbox brand out of the toilet, because without that guy pivoting hard back into games and recognising where the backlash was coming from? We would have an unnecessarily necessary camera peripheral and any physical games we had would have been worthless slabs of plastic. We wouldn't have Game Pass, and we wouldn't have had that short-lived Nintendo synergy. You can't fake brand awareness, and Phil Spencer is dripping with it every time he makes a public statement. The guy who launched the Xbone, on the other hand, was dripping with brand poison. It was a monumental fuck-up that's worth remembering.

But again - it was a monumental fuck-up that got its shit together and arguably became one of the best gaming platforms of the modern age, if not ever. And because we've seen how well Xbox has done for itself, it seems ridiculous to say it's the worst gaming blunder in history next to the N-Gage, the Atari Jaguar or Sega releasing a brand new gaming console the same day they announced it. It was one of the biggest modern fuck-ups for sure, heads justifiably rolled over it. But can we really say it was the worst blunder of all time, considering how it turned out and how it compares to some of the most unplayable pieces of shit from the 8-bit era to the 128-bit era?

Gobstoppers12 posted...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

Yeah from what I read the game was released with a glitch that made it literally unplayable after a certain point, like you'd get stuck in a room and couldn't progress. Don't know if true or not, but the fact that so many copies were dumped in a giant hole in the ground supports it...

ViewtifulJoe posted...

If you like interactive movies, day one patches, generic battle royales and splitting hairs to argue with the Xbox people over graphics maybe.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

No, I wrote you off because you completely ignored all the positive aspects of the PS4 and its generation of games lol.

I mean shit, Spider-Man alone makes a PS4 worth owning, imo.

Yeah, PS4 wasn't amazing imo tech-wise, but it was objectively better than Xbone with God of War, Horizon, Spider-Man, Bloodborne, Ghost of Tsushima, etc. And the stuff listed above are very much apparent in Xbox consoles as well.

TheHoldSteady posted...

ET almost killed the gaming industry and Atari went from being the leading console manufacturer to a nostalgia brand.

Disputed. I maintain that ET was the result not the cause.

Anything SEGA of America put out post Genesis.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

No, I wrote you off because you completely ignored all the positive aspects of the PS4 and its generation of games lol.

I mean shit, Spider-Man alone makes a PS4 worth owning, imo

No reason to give them the benefit of the doubt when I'd just be paying to be disappointed ultimately.
With Spiderman, I'm not very invested in superheroes at all. I already played Spiderman 2 years ago too, got the swinging around, doing big jumps and tying up villains thing out of my system. Outside of that it's what, another presentation focused one-and-done?

BeyondWalls posted...

Disputed. I maintain that ET was the result not the cause.

Yeah, it was the punching bag. The US game industry had been running itself into the ground for awhile at that point.

There were other 2600 games that were just as bad or worse than ET

ViewtifulJoe posted...

If you like interactive movies, day one patches, generic battle royales and splitting hairs to argue with the Xbox people over graphics maybe.

Also if you liked games that ran at 1080p and stable frame rates instead of 720-900p and laggy.

Xbone was still commercially successful. I feel like you have to put unsuccessful consoles above them.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

With Spiderman, I'm not very invested in superheroes at all

Sounds like a "you" problem, which is why I'm not very committed to having this debate. I can tell it's just gonna be a list of great things about the PS4 and its library of games, and your response will be "Oh but that's not great actually"

It'd be a waste of my time, I can just sense it.

If it was any company other than Microsoft it would have been. But Microsoft has so much money it was nothing more than a minor setback. The RROD was a much worse problem, but once again Microsoft had the money to just keep going.

The worst would probably be something like Atari making E.T. or Sega trying to support like 5 game consoles at the same time. Those tanked their companies, and in the case of Atari, the entire industry.

Son Of Spam posted...

If it was any company other than Microsoft it would have been. But Microsoft has so much money it was nothing more than a minor setback. The RROD was a much worse problem, but once again Microsoft had the money to just keep going.

The worst would probably be something like Atari making E.T. or Sega trying to support like 5 game consoles at the same time. Those tanked their companies, and in the case of Atari, the entire industry.

These + the Virtual Boy.

MrMallard posted...

I disagree that this can't be a blunder because the Xbone was still successful, because its eventual success was at the expense of what made the Xbone reveal so dogshit.

Everyone agrees it was a blunder. It just isnt the worst one in gaming history, which is what the topic is asking.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

Sounds like a "you" problem, which is why I'm not very committed to having this debate. I can tell it's just gonna be a list of great things about the PS4 and its library of games, and your response will be "Oh but that's not great actually"

It'd be a waste of my time, I can just sense it.

Well yeah. Already watched the gen set disappointment records start to finish. I don't think anything's going to undo that.

No, but it was certainly up there.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Well yeah.

Glad we cleared that up. Carry on.

Back on the subject...The Xbox One was surprisingly not that big of a failure despite its colossal gap between first and second place for the generation. PS4 sold literally double its numbers, true, but the XB1 still sold over 50 million units, which isn't terrible. It's nothing like the ~9 million sold by both the Saturn and the Dreamcast, or the ~13 million for the Wii U.

MrMallard posted...

Sony had a field day with it, releasing the most smug, s***posty video about how to share your PS4 games with friends - it was one guy handing his copy of the game to another guy. It was a slam dunk.

https://youtu.be/kWSIFh8ICaA

MrMallard posted...

I disagree that this can't be a blunder because the Xbone was still successful, because its eventual success was at the expense of what made the Xbone reveal so dogshit.

You had to have a camera hooked up to your console all the time, your console had to be connected to the internet for you to use it, and physical game discs were one-time purchase keys that became bound to your console. The most pervasive thing out of all that is the online requirements - the NSO game collections work on a similar principle, for example. But the Kinect was a fucking terrible idea, because A) it was an external peripheral that had to be plugged in, meaning that if it was damaged in some way you would be fucked out of using your $400 game console because necessary features would become locked off, and B) the combination of "necessary camera peripheral" and "always online connection" garnered a lot of criticism over surveillance. And as evidenced by the final product not having any of this, this wasn't a hardware limitation - there was no physical reason why a Kinect was physically necessary to use the console. They developed software that hamstrung the console based on a bunch of restrictive, anti-consumer protocols, and they sold it as a necessary and inevitable future.

And nothing sums up the petty, short-sighted, anti-consumer greed like single-use game activation discs - game discs that didn't contain the game and would install the game from an online server (which unfortunately did become a standard), but which would also become locked to your Xbox profile or console. So if you got sick of the game and wanted to sell it, or if you wanted to let a friend borrow it? You couldn't. The second you put it in your Xbox One, the second you used it, it became useless to every other person on the planet - like a condom. It would only ever work with your profile or console.

They tried to kill the secondhand game market (which is already a pretty volatile niche, as seen with GameStop and their shift towards nerd culture merchandise) as a way of potentially shifting more units, but which made gaming as a whole unnecessarily restrictive for the everyman who doesn't hoard this nerd shit and who can't drop hundreds of dollars on retail-priced game releases every year.

It made physical games obsolete not by offering a better solution, but by hobbling the physical medium artificially to force more financial engagement from the market. The Xbox One launch was the biggest load of horseshit of its time, and it was a low point for gaming.

With that being said: I would refer to the Xbone launch as one of the most significant, high profile blunders in recent history. Because if we're talking about all of history, the Xbone has to contend with the Atari Jaguar. It has to contend with the failure of the Saturn and Dreamcast, which had their strong suits but which bled so much money that they ended a prominent game company's hardware division. It has to contend with the Virtual Boy. Let's face it, the world of gaming have seen worse flops - the N-gage and the Ouya, even.

What I think makes the Xbox One debacle so bad is how unnecessary, scummy and hostile it was. None of it was necessary. The Kinect didn't need to be there, they didn't have to hobble functionality based on internet access and they didn't have to make game discs as useless as they were already shaping up to be. And there was no physical reason for any of this - it was all dependent on hardware. Microsoft just wanted that level of control. And Sony had a field day with it, releasing the most smug, shitposty video about how to share your PS4 games with friends - it was one guy handing his copy of the game to another guy. It was a slam dunk.

The Xbone launch wasn't a disaster on the level of the Ouya. Though frankly? If Microsoft had charged headlong into this horseshit without changing something, it could have been the most high profile disaster in the gaming industry to date and it could have sunk the Xbox brand. Microsoft would have continued, sure. But this could have been the final nail in the coffin for the Xbox, which had a ridiculously low market share in Japan for all of its iterations and which ultimately did the worst business in its first two outings.

Firing the dumb fuck who oversaw the Xbox One development cycle and replacing him with Phil Spencer is what got the Xbox brand out of the toilet, because without that guy pivoting hard back into games and recognising where the backlash was coming from? We would have an unnecessarily necessary camera peripheral and any physical games we had would have been worthless slabs of plastic. We wouldn't have Game Pass, and we wouldn't have had that short-lived Nintendo synergy. You can't fake brand awareness, and Phil Spencer is dripping with it every time he makes a public statement. The guy who launched the Xbone, on the other hand, was dripping with brand poison. It was a monumental fuck-up that's worth remembering.

But again - it was a monumental fuck-up that got its shit together and arguably became one of the best gaming platforms of the modern age, if not ever. And because we've seen how well Xbox has done for itself, it seems ridiculous to say it's the worst gaming blunder in history next to the N-Gage, the Atari Jaguar or Sega releasing a brand new gaming console the same day they announced it. It was one of the biggest modern fuck-ups for sure, heads justifiably rolled over it. But can we really say it was the worst blunder of all time, considering how it turned out and how it compares to some of the most unplayable pieces of shit from the 8-bit era to the 128-bit era?

Also good timing that it happened close to the NSA Edward Snowden leaks about surveillance. And also remember one of the tweets from the consoles lead developers saying that how the always online feature was a problem since everybody had internet.