Former Xbox gamers; where did they lose you?

[Veknoid_Outcast]

I don't know if I was every a "foremost" Xbox gamer. Maybe between 2008 and 2011?

I first invested in the Xbox ecosystem in 2008 with Xbox 360. I quickly consumed all the backward compatible Xbox games I could find: Halo, Morrowind, Splinter Cell, Ninja Gaiden, Halo 2, Psychonauts, Jade Empire, etc. Then I moved on to the 360 library: Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Halo 3, Crackdown, Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect, Arkham Asylum, Gears of War, Oblivion, etc. I routinely played Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, and Halo 3 online with friends. It was amazing.

Looking back, the slow decline started around 2011. Microsoft was still publishing great games like Gears of War 3 and Mark of the Ninja, but the frequency of must-have games began to drop. It also hurt that the company's flagship IP, Halo, began its downward slide around this time.

Still, I wasn't about to give up. While the Xbox One launch was disastrous from a PR perspective, the system actually provided a bunch of great games over its lifespan: Sunset Overdrive, Titanfall, Ori and the Blind Forest, Quantum Break, Forza Horizon 2-3, Gears of War 4, Cuphead, and, finally, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, arguably the best game of the entire 8th generation. There were some underwhelming games, of course: ReCore, Crackdown 3, Minecraft Dungeons, etc. And the Halo brand sank deeper into ignominy with Halo 5.

The wheels really started to come off with the Xbox Series. More delays, cancellations, and closures. More false hopes and broken promises. More overt signs of mismanagement. And, worst of all, fewer and fewer first-party games worth playing. I actually think Halo Infinite was a return to form, but the distribution of that game was very messy. I got the S model for $239.99 in November 2022 and since then I've used it mostly as a backward compatibility machine and to play Sea of Thieves, a game from 2018, with shorter load times. I just don't think the platform has any kind of future.

And it's not even that so many first-party Xbox games are now, or soon will be, available on PS5. It's that I don't really want to play those games, no matter where they are.