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| "Oh no, Xbox Series!" |
Poor, poor Microsoft. All the money in the world and you still couldn't buy a clue. Anything Phil Spencer says in next week's press conference will only serve to confirm gamers' suspicions that the Xbox brand has been dead in the water for years, since Don Mattrick's fateful decision in 2013 to turn the Xbox One into a consumer-hostile Pandora's Box of DRM and surveillance nightmares.
No game system could recover from that, and although the Xbox Series is certainly a better console than what had come before it, it was doomed by its manufacturer's past mistakes and hubris, just as Sega's Dreamcast was in 2001, and Nintendo's Wii U was in 2017. Yet again, I'm stuck with an abandoned game system, an underdog of the console wars that was run over by its competitors, then scraped off the road and deposited into a shallow grave by its owner.
You'd think I would learn by now. At least I'll have the foresight to scoop up all the heavily discounted Xbox Series accessories I couldn't afford when the system was still actively supported. And I could always segue into PC gaming, where your fate as a gamer is not so heavily dependent on brand loyalty. If I buy the wrong video card, I lose a little performance... no big deal. If I buy the wrong game system, I lose key exclusives, and depending on how badly the machine sells, may not play much of anything for a couple of years. (And let me tell you, the Saturn and Dreamcast were some dry, dry years.)
I'll live. I'll just have to adapt, and right now, PC gaming seems like the right path to take. (Besides, all the home game systems are barely disguised computers anyway.)
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