Xbox did a lot right with the 360. Trying to say it was 'entirely down to Sony messing up' is incredible historical revisionism.But you could argue that the success they had with the 360 was entirely down to Sony messing up with the PS3. Had they not arrived a year late and over-priced and instead got it right with that generation then the 360 would not have had anywhere near the same measure of sucess it did. Maybe that was a false flag that MS read way too much into?
Their 1st/2nd party stuff was fantastic, and they did a great job at convincing lots of 3rd parties in supporting them. For a time, they were even considered to have the better JRPG lineup, as crazy as that sounds. They were also instrumental in bridging the gap between console and PC gaming, helping get a lot of previously PC-first or even PC-only sort of developers over into supporting consoles more seriously and creating the sort of defacto multiplatform world we now have.
They killed with the online stuff and were basically single handedly responsible for the mass popularization of online gaming on consoles, boosting off their success from the OG Xbox. So much so that they charged for online while Sony didn't, and yet most people at the time felt it was entirely worth it because the experience was basically transformatively better.
They were also basically single handedly responsible for the popularization of indie games on consoles and thus indie games in the mass market in general. They really went out of their way to ensure that indie games were supported and seen.
And on a personal note, I still think that X360 controller was near perfection. Certainly miles better than the DS3, which still felt like it was designed for kid hands. I was genuinely upset when they stopped making/selling the affordable wired 360 controllers for PC.
I mean, if we're playing 'what ifs', I'd argue that if Xbox hadn't gone down the Kinect path and instead had focused their energies on maintaining the momentum they had built up all the way through like 2010, they would have won the generation, and possibly shifted the entire picture leading into the next one. They really were that strong. By no means did they just stumble into any success.
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