It's almost a cliché to bag on an easy target like Kotaku, but I feel that some recent posts on the long-running, long-vexing video game journal deserve a response. After it was revealed that Microsoft had quietly stopped manufacturing Xbox One consoles in 2020 to step up production of the Xbox Series S and X, Luke Plunkett had this to offer in way of a eulogy...
Goodbye to the Xbox One, the most pointless console I have ever owned.
Not to be out-douched, contributor Ari Notis added this...
The Xbox One is officially dead. RIP. It will not be missed.
This was followed up with such observations as "the Xbox One was a trial run for the Xbox Series X," "Toward the end of its run, if you played a glossy AAA game, you could almost feel the thing wheezing under the pressure," and most pointedly, "The Xbox One sucked!"
It must be one of those casual work days, when Kotaku gets to be a blog and throw objectivity and decorum out the window, rather than one of the days when they call themselves a reputable news source, so they can sneak their foot in the door of an industry trade show. In way of a rebuttal, I'll just let Spicoli say what I'm thinking really loudly.
I'll admit, I've had qualms with the Xbox One throughout its lifespan. The launch was a disaster thanks to the machinations of Don Mattrick, who hoped to tie the system to all kinds of onerous digital rights management, but was undone when he realized that none of the other console manufacturers planned to follow his lead. Mattrick did serious damage to the Xbox brand name, but Microsoft spent the next seven years rectifying his mistakes, sending a Day One patch to Xbox Ones which eliminated restrictions on physical games, and putting the all-seeing, all-creepy eye of the Kinect into retirement shortly afterward.
There was also the user interface, which was intuitive but puzzlingly slow for at least a year after I purchased my Xbox One S. It could take upwards of three seconds to make the constipated cursor move from one game in your library to the next, in contrast to the speedy interface of the considerably older Xbox 360. Admittedly, this should never have been a problem in the first place, but like Mattrick's dark ambitions, the sluggishness of the GUI was ultimately addressed with patches.
My point is that when Microsoft makes mistakes with the Xbox brand, it typically acknowledges and fixes them, often at great expense. The oversized "Duke" controller included with the original Xbox was eventually replaced with a smaller, more ergonomic model. Early Xbox 360s had an abysmal failure rate, but the systems were repaired or replaced free of charge by Microsoft, and later models were designed to be more reliable. The Xbox One was originally designed to be the most user-hostile piece of consumer electronics since Coleco's ADAM, but when fans expressed their frustration, Microsoft listened, changing course almost immediately.
On the other hand, when issues crop up with Sony and Nintendo's respective consoles, the response from the two companies is "tough titties." We all remember having to turn our Playstations upside down to play games, or not being able to play games at all thanks to disc read errors on the Playstation 2. The Playstation 4 is more reliable by comparison, but is needlessly encumbered with constant firmware updates that seem engineered to annoy the player rather than improve the overall experience. If you happen to install a game from disc and purchase it digitally later, you'll have to install it all over again, a process that can take many hours on a slower internet service.
As for Nintendo, the Switch's failure-prone Joycons have been giving people fits for years, and this issue still hasn't been definitively addressed. Sure you can send the controllers back to the company for repairs, but after five years, you should be able to use a Joycon without worrying that it'll fall apart in your hands. Microsoft put the red ring of death to bed with the Xbox 360 S and E... what's Nintendo's excuse?
I'm not going to sugarcoat my experience with the Xbox One... it hasn't always left me with happy memories. But in the five years that I've owned the Xbox One S, it's become my go-to game console, seeing regular use while the Switch and Playstation 4 gather dust. It's the undisputed king of backward compatibility, with hundreds of games from the Xbox and Xbox 360 libraries running on the system in both disc and digital forms, and even improved with sharper resolutions. Native games run fine as well... obviously they're not going to run as well as they would on the latest hardware, but I've played fifty hours of the 2020 release Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and it hasn't brought my Xbox One S to its knees as Notis suggests.
Finally, when I do eventually upgrade to the Series, I'll be better served with it than the Playstation 5, as all of the games I purchased for the One (and the 360, and the classic Xbox) will be right there waiting for me, and appropriately upscaled to the new hardware in some cases. The Xbox One will ultimately grant me a smooth transition to its successor, unlike Sony, whose statement that "we believe in generations" sounds a lot to me like "you'll start your game collection all over again and you'll like it."
The writers at Kotaku might be dancing on the grave of the Xbox One, gleefully toppling tombstones and kicking over flower pots, but I won't be joining them in their mean-spirited mambo. It took a while for it to get there, but the Xbox One eventually became my favorite console of the last generation... and it was Microsoft's dedication to the machine in spite of a rough start and disappointing sales that put it at the top.
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