DroidKnight said: Ryuu96 said: Most people grow out of it by their 40s Does that community include Spade and Noble? Not sure who they are, do they post in here? Spoiler!

The one that's a talking duck can be ignored

Sorry to the one person who voted yes but I wanted to get rid of it since it's too much consistent effort for little reason, as the majority said no, I'm dumping it and streamlining some more, I also agreed it was pointless, Lol. Trunks posts all the same Xbox news onto the front page which everyone navigates anyway, anything important goes into the title, anything smaller will be seen by browsing the thread. This thread will be a nightmare to update if ABK comes under so I need to streamline it, update it only after the major events because I'll have no other reason to update it between them.

I have been reading all those posts with a Donald voice.

Hey partner, only Discord dweebs play that genre. 

How do I report a mod? This is targeted harassment. 

You ask @trunkswd to blame Ryuu in his next podcast

I definitely think that the early 360 years, which were affected by Peter Moore's vision, were the peak for Xbox. The only real downside of those years was the Red Ring of Death, but the rest of the 360 early years were great. Their first and 2nd party was putting out bangers like Halo 3, Halo ODST, Halo Reach, Halo Wars, Forza Motorsport 2 and 3, Fable 2 and 3, Gears of War 1 and 2, Project Gotham Racing 3 and 4, Viva Pinata. They were trying hard in Japan, convincing Square Enix to make FF13 multiplatform when it had been PS exclusive since FF7, and getting exclusives and timed exclusives such as Lost Odyssey, Tales of Vesperia, Star Ocean 4, Tenchu Z, Ninja Gaiden 2, Dead or Alive 4, Lost Planet, Ace Combat 6, Guilty Gear 2, Infinite Undiscovery, and more. They were also getting a fair few exclusives and timed exclusives from western 3rd parties, Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Bioshock 1, Amped 3, the 2 Ubisoft Naruto games, Saints Row 1, and more.

Unfortunately, Xbox started to go downhill not too long after Don Mattrick took over for Peter Moore. Mattrick put a stop to Peter Moore's Japanese exclusive initiative by 2010, 2010-2013 only really saw Japanese exclusives from niche schmup, visual novel, and dungeon crawler devs, the big Japanese publishers stopped releasing exclusives because Xbox was no longer paying them for exclusivity. This started a downwards trend in Japan that has lasted until today and burned bridges with a fair few Japanese developers and publishers. Xbox stopped getting bigger western 3rd party exclusives by the mid-gen as well. Instead of chasing core console market growth, Mattrick became focused on chasing the success of Wii's motion controls via Kinect, several Xbox 1st party studios ended up focusing on Kinect after that point, including existing studios Lionhead and Rare, while several new 1st party studios were opened for Kinect development including BigPark and Good Science Studio. They barely focused on core game development, we got some new Forza, Halo, and Gears games, but that was about it, they didn't expand their 1st party with any new core development studios, while Rare and Lionhead were largely lost to Kinect. It ended up being a poor vision for long term success, the motion control mania quickly proved to be a fad rather than a market with lasting appeal; while the Kinect did boost 360's sales in the later half of the gen, many of those buyers were casuals who didn't end up buying core software, and as such they developed no real attachment to the Xbox brand and were lost by the time the next generation started. 

Then Mattrick continued his poor choices while building Xbox One, instead of refocusing on core games and getting large numbers of core exclusives to push Xbox One in it's early years, he got the bright idea to make it a multimedia box, pushing features like being able to watch tv in a picture in picture window while playing a game. He also was pushing for PC like DRM to limit used game sales. On top of that, the console itself was poorly designed, it was somewhat oversized, not particularly good looking, had a weaker chipset than PS4, and had DDR3 coupled with only a small cache of faster ESRAM instead of a unified pool of fast GDDR4 RAM like PS4. And the cherry on top, a bundled Kinect 2.0, the sequel to a fad device which was doomed to fail from the start, bringing the price of Xbox One to $500, $100 more than PS4. And then on top of that, he had a late launch in Japan, further alienating Japanese developers and publishers who had already felt alienated after Mattrick's rather abrupt abandonment of the Japanese exclusive program in 2010, as well as many Japanese Xbox fans from the previous 2 generations, burning even more bridges in Japan. 

It has been nearly a decade (will be 10 years in May) since Mattrick's Xbox One reveal blunders, and though many things have improved under Phil Spencer, Xbox is still struggling in many ways. Japan sales are up compared to last gen, but still a shadow of the 360 years, largely because they seem unwilling to pay for Japanese exclusives like Peter Moore was, and even worse they seem to have totally lost Square Enix support at this point, one of the biggest Japanese publishers; they even made the baffling move of raising Series S pricing in Japan, hurting it's sales there (which had been solid up until that point). Their first party is larger than it has ever been, but they are still suffering from management and development blunders presumably due to a lack of firm guidance from above. The marketing is largely better than last gen, but still not what it was in those peak 360 years. They are struggling with hardware production still in regards to Series X, and seem unwilling to price cut the Series S or make a killer bundle for it even though it's demand has slowed alot, the combination resulted in Xbox getting outsold by PS5 by a larger margin this past quarter than at any point during the Xbox One vs PS4 early-mid years. There has been a noticeable decrease in limited edition console and controller designs compared to Xbox One. The user experience is fairly lackluster, the UI is a bit of a mess (too large of icons that block the background, no musical backgrounds as of yet, too many ads), Game DVR is a mess (short length record length, meh recording quality, and now we have lost the ability to share to twitter due to Microsoft beefing with Elon Musk), the achievements system badly needs some updates both in terms of design and functionality.

There is hope on the horizon for Xbox, especially if the ABK acquisition is approved, but they really need to buckle down now and focus on some of these issues that still plague Xbox, regardless of the outcome of the acquisition. Especially since this acquisition will get them few exclusives due to CoD 10 year multiplat deals and 2 of Blizzard's biggest series seeing new multiplatform releases shortly before the acquisition, this acquisition won't be some magical bailout button for them, they're going to have to put in some hard work to fix these issues that still plague Xbox.