Seriously… How Did Xbox Last This Long?

[Pemalite]

What got me invested in Xbox back in the ancient and distant era of 2001 was... Exclusives.

Even though I was a PC gamer and got Halo and Fable... Most of my friends were poor dirty console peasants, so they bought the Xbox... So I had to buy an Xbox.
And we would all lug our chunky back-breaking CRT's and beefy consoles to school and the teachers would lock us in the Library for the entire weekend (We were living off Pizza and soft drinks) and we would game with Halo over the local area network (That I ironically built when I was in school) all night long.

Then Halo 2 happened.

... Then the Xbox 360 happened.
And ironically the reason I bought the Xbox 360 was because of Perfect Dark, one of my favorite games on Nintendo 64... But also because of other promising exclusives like Halo 3 and Fable 2... Which were coming off the hot backs of Halo 2 and Fable 1 TLC. - Then Gears of War Happened.

Microsoft was offering us PC snobs the games we liked on console... And that is arguably why I probably own every console today.

I still invested in the Xbox One... Again for the promise of exclusives (Mostly interested in Halo and Fable on Xbox), but they were fizzlers, Halo 5 was garbage and the Master Chief Collection was an unplayable, broken, buggy mess.
But... Microsoft did offer compelling backwards compatibility which allowed me to play the games I used to love... But better.

Then the Xbox Series happened. And whilst I was a day 1 owner, I was hoping for a return to form as the Xbox Series X hardware is truly fantastic, it just needed those games... But this isn't strictly a Microsoft issue either, I was a Day 1 owner of the PS5 and there still hasn't been any compelling exclusives that really have made me go "wow". - And majority of games release on PC anyway.

Halo Infinite did drop and it was definitely built with the Xbox One hardware in mind, it was barebones, it was boring... It wasn't the height that Halo used to be known for.
The Perfect Dark reboot imploded, Fable still hasn't arrived and many of the promises of amazing games just never eventuated.

*****

With the advent and domination of digital gaming on consoles and with everything coming to PC, this generation is likely to be my last console generation... Be it Playstation or Xbox, there just isn't any point to owning those platforms anymore.
Plus if I am going digital, I am sticking with PC where I can play those same games and play those games everywhere on any PC hardware I want... Whether it's handheld or a TV. One library.