[exsomet]

I remember getting an Xbox One and being excited about the concept of it being the center for entertainment in my house. The marketing promise was that it would integrate with TVs and music and make those things better in ways that were sort of nebulous and not super well defined, and that unfortunately came at the expense of it delivering a good gaming experience.

The first red flag should have been Microsoft trying to push the weird metro/UWP interface that it had with news, the store, movies and a tv guide, and more versus a library of games, and then of course all of the bad PR around Kinect and the DRM. It didn’t have backwards compatibility at launch and most of the games were things that were already out on 360, but for some reason we needed to re-buy.

The game experience never improved and the home entertainment thing never materialized, so you were just left with something that did exactly what the 360 did and duplicated your existing DVR/cable box.

The X/S wasn’t better. First you had to fight scalpers to get one, and then my first experience with it was browsing the store and seeing that I had to pick between buying the Xbox one version of games or the X/S version. The entire thing was built around some new revolutionary concept of streaming cloud games, which didn’t work. Games are FPS capped and if you install them locally they require 15 of the 45 minutes you have to game to download updates that should happen while the thing sleeps. It got slightly better over time, but juxtaposed with my pc and steam it was such an unpolished experience.

What it really comes down to for me is that it’s a gaming console that tries to do a bunch of stuff I don’t care about and fails at the one thing I do care about it doing (playing games). There’s a larger commentary here about Microsoft, but this isn’t unique to them. I should have been a lifelong console buyer; instead I will probably not buy another one because for the past two generations the experience has been awful, and whatever they come out with next is going to be packed with a bunch of streaming junk and AI and other stuff I don’t want, and will not do the thing I do want in any way that competes with the old faithful PC and steam.