Yeah, those aren't innovations; just popularization of other things.

The one thing I hate is they make it very difficult to cancel your Xbox live. Went to finally cancel mine the other day and the website was having none of it.

Had to eventually call them up to get any sort of satisfaction.

Huh? Just don't renew your subscription.

I was going in to change that. And everytime I unselected the option I was getting a ton of error messages. 

It's all done now but it was a pain.

Only read the OP, so might be retreading ground here...

MS introduced built-in hard drives and good online console play with the OG Xbox, and then added achievements and refined the online aspect with 360, as well as popularizing indies. Perhaps the modern design of triggers on controllers were also theirs last gen, could be wrong though. The 360 controller becoming a default for PC gaming is something of a bullet point, but thats not exactly innovation I guess.

...and that's really about as far as I can go with crediting MS. They had to innovate somewhere to be where they are in the market today, and last gen was where it happened.

Yes I am stalking you. You are so popular breh.

Gears Of War was in development for years, it was actually called Unreal Warfare back then during early development. The only reason it was exclusive to 360 was because Microsoft payed for it. It's as simple as that. If Microsoft didn't publish it, someone else would have on consoles.

Epic Games doesn't owe Microsoft for the success of the franchise. If you really think it wouldn't have been on consoles without Microsoft you.....I don't know. You're just wrong. Did you know that even Halo started off as a PC/Mac game before Microsoft bought the IP to put on the OG Xbox? 

shikamaru317 said: Ka-pi96 said: Achievements - Agreed. I think they are by far the best thing Microsoft has brought to gaming Hard drives - Another incredibly important one, although considering the PS3 and Wii (I think) also had hard drives and were only a year later that may well have happened even without Microsoft. Xbox Live - I miss local multiplayer Halo - I think COD Modern Warfare did a lot more for FPS than Halo did. Yeah, but Halo paved the way for CoD. Before Halo, FPS as a genre just didn't exist on consoles, Rare had attempted it with 007 and Perfect Dark and that was pretty much it.  Gears of War - Microsoft may have funded it, but it was Epic's game. WRPGs - The only thing I can think of here is getting Mass Effect as an exclusive. I think 3rd party companies did much more for WRPGs than Microsoft by far. Them becoming bigger than JRPGs too is because of 3rd parties (many Japanese companies forgetting how to make good games) I think he's referring to the fact that WRPG's were mainly a PC only genre before developers started putting them on Xbox. For instance Elder Scrolls, Xbox was the first console to get an Elder Scrolls game. The original Xbox also got KOTOR and Fable, which PS2 didn't get. Xbox 360 was also the first console to get a Witcher game and a Mass Effect game. Other stuff - Kinect not really an innovation, PS Eyetoy? I don't think PS Eye Toy can even be compared to Kinect. Kinect was definitely an innovation in many ways, it didn't really do much good for gaming itself, but it's voice commands are definitely innovative for turning on your system and navigating to aps like Netflix.  Bolded

Cannot take you seriously when you bring up voice commands, kinect and innovation, something that is done with a 5 dollar mic..... really scrapping the bottom of the barrel in this thread, most MS brought to gaming was bad ideas, paywalls, timed DLC, timed exclusives, Parity clauses, underhanded practices. non of this existed before MS tried to buy there way to merket leader and failed.

i hate microsoft because they made some precious jp games as console exclusives (like Ace Combat 6) and they continue doing it even now which really doesnt help them win the Jp market (god when are they going to give up) and these games would hardly do well outside jp but if these games were to release on PS then it would have sold a lot better. (captain obvious)

I'm not 100% sure but wasn't Halo going to be like a RTS game before M$ stepped in?