20 years ago to the day, Microsoft was not without difficulty entering the tough arena of the game console market with the first Xbox of the name, deployed in Spain on March 14, 2002.
A brand that has experienced many setbacks and even risked going out of business on many occasions, to finally rise today as one of the major pillars of the industry, thanks to an ambitious strategy that shows ultimately paid off. Retrospective on the famous console marked with a green X!
A difficult birth marked with a green cross
At the end of the 90s, Microsoft rubbed shoulders with the stars on the PC market with Windows, the operating system which is still the most widely used in the world today. But in 1999, Sony was going to shake the Redmond firm with the PlayStation 2, a kind of living room PC capable of reading CDs and DVDs, risking putting the PC market in danger.
Behind the scenes at Microsoft, four renegade engineers making up the DirectX team were going to defy many prohibitions to imagine a machine running under Windows and DirectX to display more graphically accomplished games on a home console. Not content with wanting to offer what looked like a living room PC, the team also wanted its machine to be a pioneer in online gaming. A project that many at Microsoft then considered a joke.
But the small DirectX team, despite disappointments and ambient skepticism, went after their idea, with the cautious approval of Bill Gates. After several iterations, the name Xbox, considered their worst option, was finally adopted following a long marketing study. But the setbacks didn't stop there, since a crucial presentation of a prototype during the Game Developer's Conference in 2000 ended in failure because it... wouldn't start.
Fortunately, technical demos showing impressive graphics and particularly accomplished physics for the time saved the project from drowning. On March 14, 2002, the first Xbox was launched in Europe and achieved the unexpected feat of competing with the PlayStation 2 around the world. On the one hand thanks to its much more powerful hardware, but also thanks to iconic licenses like Fable or a certain Halo: Combat Evolved, which revolutionized the FPS on console and used the equally revolutionary Xbox Live wonderfully.
A climb strewn with pitfalls
Feeling its wings growing, Microsoft went into overdrive for its second generation console, the famous Xbox 360, released in 2005. Launched earlier than the PlayStation 3 and at a much more competitive price, it was Microsoft's turn to make Sony tremble… before the terrible “Red Ring of Death”, linked to a problem of cooling of the processor, comes to sow chaos. To save the day, Microsoft decided to pay out of pocket to repair the countless consoles affected. A very costly decision, but which was once again going to save the brand from drowning… for a while.
Indeed, for the Xbox One, released in 2013, the Redmond firm (having eyes bigger than its stomach) did the opposite of what had been done for the previous generation. Originally sold terribly expensive with the infamous integrated Kinect and too focused on multimedia, Xbox hit rock bottom again and lost ground against a much better PlayStation 4 in the purely "games console" aspect, especially through of its flagship exclusive licenses. The Xbox One will finally have been saved by a new strategy aimed at removing the Kinect and refocusing on the fundamentals of such a product.
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A bright future?
We are gradually catching up to the present with the current generation of Xbox consoles, the Series X|S, rolled out two years ago and still difficult to obtain in a climate of unprecedented health crisis. Despite their power, their much better labeled price and a renewed focus on video games, the latter have a hard time keeping up with an equally powerful PS5 but once again counting on much better exclusives like Demon's Souls , Returnal, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart or to some extent Horizon Forbidden West.
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But where Xbox has clearly managed to stand out from its best enemy is in the development of services that go beyond the simple home console. The Game Pass is now an essential service, especially since the historic takeover of Bethesda and, if it is validated by the competent authorities, that of Activision Blizzard. Xbox also has a head start on Cloud Gaming with the solid xCloud, allowing in particular to play the very vast Game Pass catalog on devices other than the PC or the console.
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Ultimately, Xbox has come a long way since its very first console released here exactly 20 years ago. If its future is more dematerialized than that of Sony, it is clear that such a direction seems to bode very well for the famous brand with the green X.
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