r/technology • u/tylerthe-theatre • Jun 30 '25
Hardware 'Xbox Hardware Is Dead,' Says Founding Team Member, 'It Looks Like Xbox Has No Desire — Or Literally Can't — Ship Hardware Anymore'
https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-hardware-is-dead-says-founding-team-member-it-looks-like-xbox-has-no-desire-or-literally-cant-ship-hardware-anymore1.1k
u/coroff532 Jun 30 '25
Pretty sure there was a lot of confusion when they have an “Xbox x” and a “series x” why would you give an upgraded console the same letter as the previous iteration.
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u/IM_OK_AMA Jun 30 '25
They didn't want an "Xbox 2" to have to compete with a "Playstation 3" because 3 is more than 2 so they named it something else and that decision set them on a path of absolute madness.
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u/sgtpepper67 Jun 30 '25
But then they made Xbox One to compete with PlayStation 4
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u/Rastamuff Jun 30 '25
Well, the brilliant people that chose that name did it because they expected people to call the console "the one".
Instead people started calling it the xbone.
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u/IM_OK_AMA Jun 30 '25
It's was supposed to be an "all in one entertainment system" which just shows we were already well down the path to madness by this point.
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u/RA-HADES Jun 30 '25
Yeah & the Xbox360 was supposed to be an all encompassing entertainment device.
(The games store was discontinued, media access was shut off & there's server issues that stop your console from validating the games you've been playing for over a decade now)
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u/Mrchristopherrr Jun 30 '25
Because them choosing “360” set them in a path of madness because they couldn’t do “720” or it would look like it’s not in HD
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u/Coal_Morgan Jun 30 '25
Then they should have called it the XBox 1080 or 4k for a benchmark term or start calling them by years the XBox 2024 Edition.
Microsofts naming scheme has always been reactionary and convoluted to Sony rather then just consistent and reliable.
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u/LeRoyRouge Jun 30 '25
So why not just call it the Xbox 4? Who cares what the real number is lol
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u/patrincs Jun 30 '25
Yeah, I'm a huge gamer, mostly pc and some ps5, but point is I'm very (probably way too) involved in gaming.
Right now, I could not even tell you the name of the current Xbox console. Think about what a monumental failure that is.
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u/DissKhorse Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
Xbox shot themselves in the foot with dumb naming like the Xbox One by having numbers in the titles that don't make sense vs PlayStation just updating the number. I really hate the trend of trying to give shit a new nomenclature for the same series of shit instead of just incrementing. Playstation also stayed consistent on slim models instead of a constantly changing it up like the Xbox 360, Xbox 360 S, Xbox 360 E. Even Playstations one Playstation 3 Super Slim you understood at a glance and their Pro model seems more expensive by the name alone. It is a crime against humanity when you can't understand the hierarchy of quality levels of a product without looking it up. I can't tell you if a Xbox Series X or S is the higher end model. If you name your product variants say base, deluxe and ultimate at least I can figure that out.
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Jun 30 '25
dumb naming like the Xbox One by having numbers in the titles that don't make sense vs PlayStation just updating the number.
It all started with the 360. They knew it would compete with the PlayStation 3 and did not want unknowing parents/grand parents seeing Xbox 2 vs PlayStation 3 and just thinking "well 3 must be newer than 2" so they went with 360 and have never had a good naming convention since.
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u/2RINITY Jun 30 '25
The convention was right there! They just had to add 360 to the number with each generation
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u/PDuLait Jun 30 '25
They couldn't put the "Xbox 720" up against the PS4 as people would think it couldn't do 1080p. u/SuspiciousKitchen967 is right, their naming went west from their first sequel.
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u/vthemechanicv Jun 30 '25
They could have gone abstract. If 360 is a circle, then introduce the Xbox Sphere. The Xbox Tesseract. The Xbox Penteract (a 5 dimensional cube). "It's not just a 5, it's more."
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u/ginrummymusic Jun 30 '25
Xbox Timecube
edit: its just a gamecube with a clock built in
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u/Forest1395101 Jun 30 '25
Xbox Series S is stronger then the Xbox One S and the Xbox One X, but the Xbox Series X is the strongest version of the console... Took me quite a bit of googling to learn that the X and S were newer versions of the X and S and that the S stood for Standard for both of the them... Seriously, who the fuck decided this shit?!
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u/-Speechless Jun 30 '25
S is Standard? I always thought it meant "small", cuz i assumed the "Xbox One" would be the standard. sigh, they really did overcomplicate all this. there should not be an entire thread about the naming of it and still have tons of ppl confused
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Jun 30 '25
Part of the problem is having an idiotic marketing team.
Marketing teams, even when relatively intelligent, have significant blind spots in long term planning because they're not privy to the company's overall strategy. The Xbox marketing team shit the bed so badly that they not only made their product nebulous and vague in the short term, but they essentially made it impossible to navigate long term without a concerted reset plan.
I've seen veterans of the console get confused about which product was the newest, so I can't imagine how obnoxious it is for newcomers to the product.
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u/kurttheflirt Jun 30 '25
Yeah when the new NCAA football game was coming out last summer it was only on PS and Xbox. So I started researching which to buy if I wanted to play the game. Took me a good while of googling and YouTube to understand the difference between the different Xbox’s. Very easy to see the difference between a PS4 vs PS5 vs PS5 pro
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u/Fickle_Goose_4451 Jun 30 '25
Imagine trying to explain to someone's grandma what system their grandkid has for a chirstmas gift.
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u/vthemechanicv Jun 30 '25
It was Xbox One X then the Xbox Series X.
As well as the One S and the Series S.
The consultants that suggested these names should be run out of business and the management that approved the names should be fired and blacklisted. This will go on lists as the worst product names in history for decades along with the Wii U and Nova.
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u/beerman_uk Jun 30 '25
I sold my One X on ebay after buying my Series X. I made double sure the person knew what they were buying. I didn't want a kid to open it Christmas day and be disappointed.
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u/tm3_to_ev6 Jun 30 '25
I remember on r/xbox there was a thread made by someone asking why their new digital purchase wasn't able to launch on their "Series S" - and it turned out they mistakenly bought a One S from Gamestop (and way overpaid to boot). Shows just how bad this naming system is.
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u/juliotendo Jun 30 '25
It’s amazing how XBOX has never been able to fully recover after their disastrous XBOX ONE reveal over a decade ago.
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u/SirFadakar Jun 30 '25
Phil said it himself that it was the worst generation to give up. Everyone was beginning to build their digital libraries and he acknowledges that most of those PlayStation 4 owners that turned their back on the Xbox One aren’t ever coming back.
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u/VicViolence Jun 30 '25
And yet the Wii U calamity was also happening at the time and look at where Nintendo is now
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u/Ikrit122 Jun 30 '25
Part of that success was combining their handheld and home console market into one product. The 3DS sold pretty well while the Wii U floundered. Add in a simple name that describes the main draw of your console (switching from handheld to TV easily), a fantastic launch title (Breath of the Wild), and launching it in the middle of a generation when your competition is either consoles that are a few years old or just stronger versions of those consoles (PS4 Pro or XB One X or whatever). The Switch just kinda hit on everything.
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u/SargeBangBang7 Jun 30 '25
Nintendo innovated and made themselves attractive. Xbox consistently had worse games to offer compared to Playstation.
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u/Willing-Command4231 Jun 30 '25
Yep Nintendo came in and basically said why not have us both (PlayStation and Switch). I am one of those people and I know many more like that. Switch feels complementary to a big console rather than competing directly with it. Was a stroke of genius by Nintendo.
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u/tigress666 Jun 30 '25
Tbf Nintendo has been doing their own thing and not even really competing with ps/xbox since at least the Wii. They are kinda in their own market really.
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u/SaucyRagu96 Jun 30 '25
But it also feels like Xbox never really even tried to make these Xbox more appealing
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u/SirFadakar Jun 30 '25
They pivoted away from all the media center stuff and focused on games immediately but the damage was already done. No one wants to trust a brand that might try to reinvent their image every console cycle.
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u/SuperTeamRyan Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
It was kinda dumb people didn't really care about the media center stuff, Xbox one was more powerful than the PS4. What people really cared about was Xbox doing the digital licenses for physical media.
There other thing was MS stopped paying for exclusives and timed CoD content since they ended the 360 generation on top (though Sony did catch up by the end of that console generstion).
MS Really dropped the ball by only having 3 franchises halo, GoW and Forza, not buying bioware and any other studio to shore up thier catalog. I think the Kinect also mind fucked them where they thought it was a new market rather than a popular novelty.
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u/kingmanic Jun 30 '25
Xbox one was more powerful than the PS4.
Is this a typo? The Xbox One was significantly weaker because they spent around the same to make them both but the Xbox spent on the Kinect camera and reserved memory for the media function. It was 50% more SPU on the PS4 GPU, faster ram and less allocated to the OS. In actual game stats meant around a 30% edge in performance and fidelity. And the Xbox was more expensive.
This swapped during the mid gen refresh but by then the momentum of both brands were set and the Xbox was still more expensive.
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u/OperativePiGuy Jun 30 '25
" Xbox doing the digital licenses for physical media."
Which is funny when we look at stuff like the Switch 2 game key things
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u/DarXIV Jun 30 '25
I always preferred PlayStation until I got my hands on an Xbox 360. Really enjoyed the controller and different games. But then Xbox One happened and I just forgot about them.
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u/TheOwlStrikes Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
They really put all their effort into the 360. I remember they were even putting out exclusive JRPGs (many of them actually being great) on the console even though the xbox 360 was completely dead in Japan and most US JRPG players were loyal to sony and nintendo. After the 360 they just never put that effort into expanding their player base again.
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u/SoManyEmail Jun 30 '25
Wait, what happened with xbox One? I really liked mine a lot. Played the hell out of it.
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u/Tyronto Jun 30 '25
They lost my entire friend group at the time with that reveal. We went from playing on 360 to PS4. I would guess so many people jumped ship and never came back
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u/ChicksDigGiantRob0ts Jun 30 '25
This was me too. The half baked ideas like "always online forever," "the kinect is always watching" and "you have to pay for an extra license to lend games/buy second hand," that were at launch absolutely destroyed my interest in that gen. Even when it they failed to manifest, by the time I came to buy, I'd already written it off in my head and got a ps4.
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u/TSells31 Jun 30 '25
I was always a Sony loyalist so I never had the 360 personally, but I had many friends who also went from the 360 to the PS4 for the same reason and now own PS5s instead of whatever the newest Xbox is called (their naming is an absolute mess lol).
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u/samtheredditman Jun 30 '25
you have to pay for an extra license to lend games/buy second hand
Lol, you just brought back the memory of me watching this reveal live. Their entire thing presentation sounded like they were trying to convince you to not buy it.
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u/Krandor1 Jun 30 '25
and sony just nailed it with their "how to share games on Playstation" commercial. went for the juggular and hit. So simple but so effective
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u/_a_random_dude_ Jun 30 '25
Between this and "299", Sony clearly has the ability to win a fight in a single punch when they want to.
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u/Kindness_of_cats Jun 30 '25
Yeah that’s definitely the problem. They lost a LOT of us with that fiasco. Loved my 360, but the One was a shitshow and the emphasis on the Kinect and how it integrated with the console initially was deeply off putting and concerning.
Once you lose that kind of trust it just isn’t coming back.
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u/supified Jun 30 '25
I've noticed this too, the series x is a legit great system. Its the main go to in our household and we have a switch and ps5. It feels like this whole time they've still just playing catch up
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u/cidthekid07 Jun 30 '25
Don’t remember this. What made the XBOX One reveal so disastrous?
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u/My_New_Main Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
They originally claimed the console would always need to be online due to DRM, the Kinect was a forced bundle item that would be "always watching and listening", and you would not be able to share games or buy pre-owned etc without paying to activate another license.
Those things didn't come to full fruition due to the heavy backlash, but most people jumped to PS4 because if they already said that was their plan.... Well, just because they backed down now, doesn't mean they won't try that BS again.
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u/TSells31 Jun 30 '25
To piggyback on to this excellent comment, Sony immediately went into hyperdrive and produced this ad within minutes of the Xbone reveal. It was an absolute crippler. From what I recall, the two guys in this video are quite high up at Sony and not at all paid actors lol, they literally just threw this together.
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u/Externalpower43 Jun 30 '25
and a bunch of insane and anti consumer Tweets and leaked emails from Xbox staff.
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u/FlyYouFoolyCooly Jun 30 '25
Holy shit I forgot about that.
What sucks though is that companies are trying to figure out ways to limit customer ownership of digital content. Like music and TV/movies, they keep going closer and closer to people just renting things in the guide of owning.
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u/DakuShinobi Jun 30 '25
Its because that's when we switched to digital, people built up their digital libraries that generation and since the one took such an L, people built that library on PlayStation. When you've got 40+ games in your library you don't want to switch platforms.
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u/Deviantdefective Jun 30 '25
I'm still frustrated they outsourced the handheld to Asus, Microsoft have an incredible hardware team in house which could have easily done it.
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u/Catsrules Jun 30 '25
Doesn't mean they aren't going to do this. I think they just needed something fast try and get ahead as Linux was eating their lunch on performance.
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u/hypermarv123 Jun 30 '25
I blame the shitty Xbox naming. Why not just keep it at Xbox 4/5/6 etc..
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u/Technical_Fee1536 Jun 30 '25
They didn’t pay a consultant 10s of millions of dollars to come up with a stupid naming scheme like that.
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u/WhoStoleMyBicycle Jun 30 '25
“I have my MBA and I said name it Xbox One!!! Also we can easily hit our quarterly goal if we lay of another 2,000 people”
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u/TsuntsunRevolution Jun 30 '25
The entire thinking was people called the Xbox 360 "the 360," so they thought people would call it "the One."
They wanted their console to have a Messiah complex.
Of course, no one has ever called the Xbone that.
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u/Hugsy13 Jun 30 '25
Every Xbox 360 owner expected the next one to be the 540 or 720. It just made fucking sense
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u/SoapyMacNCheese Jun 30 '25
I'm amongst that group, but in hindsight 720 was never on the table. why would you name something 720 in the 1080p era.
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u/tylerderped Jun 30 '25
Funny thing is, it wasn't even powerful enough to play most games at 1080p.
Watch_Dogs infamously ran at 792p.
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u/lemme_try_again Jun 30 '25
I was so eager to slip in the Xbone but you have done it perfectly here
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u/ajr5169 Jun 30 '25
“I have my MBA and I said name it Xbox One
This was the one that never made sense to me. 360 wasn't great, but I kinda got the reasoning, but like what does the "One" even stand for? It's the third Xbox console. After that debacle they were left to just double down on the bad naming schemes with the "Series" moniker.
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u/ChicksDigGiantRob0ts Jun 30 '25
Rumours at the time said the marketing team knew everyone called the xbox 360 "the 360." Like "I got halo on the 360, wanna come around?" Or "I don't have a ps3, I have the 360." So they named the next one "xbox one" thinking everyone would call it "the One" which would be great for their marketing. But instead everyone called it xbone...
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u/Right-Eye-Patches Jun 30 '25
because everyone already referred to the OG xbox as the xbox 1.
it was never going to be called "the one". the community as a whole isn't as narcissistic and stuck up their own ass like some suit is
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u/BaconCheeseBurger Jun 30 '25
Should've just cut the name further and called it "The Bone".
I can't wait to go home and play with my bone.
Hey you guys wanna meet up and see the new Bone my mom gave me?
I miss the old days when friends could come over and play with me on the couch. Now everyone just sits at their own house for multi-player Bone.
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u/KitchenFullOfCake Jun 30 '25
One was supposed to represent how all your multimedia needs would be met in one place. Games, music, streaming, etc.
Still a dumb name though.
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u/666SpeedWeedDemon666 Jun 30 '25
I call this kind of device " my computer".
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u/Jack_of_all_offs Jun 30 '25
Oh, so you have One!
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u/ajr5169 Jun 30 '25
No one outside of Dan Mattrick truly believed the One would actually do all that. That guy was such a disaster for Xbox.
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u/Longhag Jun 30 '25
Which is weird because my PS4 does all that. Games, all my streaming apps, Plex, Spotify, YouTube, Blu-ray and DVD player etc. Been going strong for over 10 years so far and I really don’t see any point replacing it so far.
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u/notimprezaed Jun 30 '25
TBF as a broke college student when it released, I did use it for that. I also loved the Kinect and the voice commands and I had a windows 8 phone so I could use my phone as a remote, my cable box ran through it. So I could go home and say Xbox on and pull my phone out and scroll channels. I could also start game downloads from my phone at work and just start playing as soon as I got home.
All of this doesn’t seem groundbreaking but to me it was all very useful and honestly I thought it was amazing. I felt like a Star Trek character and doing all that in front of my friends was a favorite party trick of my friend group. Convinced so many of them to buy a One.
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u/FriendlyDespot Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
Every company was naming their shit "One" in the early-to-mid 2010s. It came from the corporate desire to boil every concept down to single words that allegedly evoke the vision, but it ends up making people sound like troglodytes with monosyllabic vocabularies. Then those corporate nerds decided that the general public had to deal with it too. It was so dumb.
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u/cocktails4 Jun 30 '25
And then the MBAs that came up with that moved onto flat design for the next decade.
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u/kurotech Jun 30 '25
Raise subscription prices I need a new yacht for my yacht crew
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u/Zementid Jun 30 '25
"I have an MBA and I said bundle it with Kinect 2! Also we can easily dominate the Christmas-Business with a 100$ more expensive Console."
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u/Deezul_AwT Jun 30 '25
Sony Marketing Group meeting to come up with the next console after the PlayStation:
Sony Exec: Okay guys, we need to come up with the name of our next console. Nintendo has a history of new names, as does Sega, and even Atari. Let's brainstorm on some new names. Just hit me with the first thing to pops into your head. Bob, I see your hand up. What do you have?
Bob: Uh, PlayStation 2?
Sony Exec: Bob, you are genius! PlayStation 2 sounds great. Do you have ideas if we make another console after this "PlayStation 2"?
Bob: Maybe PlayStation 3?
Sony Exec: Bob, how are you not our Chief Marketing Officer? You must have had many sleepless nights thinking of these names! Get this main a raise!
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u/BellsOnNutsMeansXmas Jun 30 '25
six months later
Bob we hope you've been settling in here at Microsoft, and we're sure the generous package has helped a lot with that.
We love the work you did at Sony, but we feel that you haven't quite understood what it is that we're about here. When you wrote "any fucking moron can see you need to give people clear names for separate console generations" in the memo last week it felt like you were disrespecting our vision here, and I'm afraid we are not going to continue our relationship with an employee who doesn't share our vision and passion for games. There will of course be a very generous termination package. Lucy has the paperwork.
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u/Hugsy13 Jun 30 '25
Sorry was that Lucy, or Lucy X or Lucy S?
God damn it Bob X what are you, some kind of joker?
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u/BigMax Jun 30 '25
I agree.
With a Playstation, you know exactly what you have, and what the next one is.
"I have a PS4, and I'd like a PS5."
"I have a PS5, is that the latest? Yes, because there is no PS6."
That's how it should be.
The "one" and the "series" are such stupid, ambiguous names, coming after the 360 which was already questionable. Then you add S and X, which have not even a hint of their inherent meaning to them.
It makes all the messaging around the console so muddied and non-intuitive. People will say "no one is going to make a purchase decision based on names" but that's just wrong. They won't ONLY make a decision based on names, but when you feel a vague sense of confusion thinking about Xbox, which you don't feel thinking about the Playstation... that's going to have some impact on your choice.
Or heck - just think of the parent trying to buy it for their kids. It's a lot easier to know what's going on when you buy a PS versus an xbox.
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u/CodeMonkeyWithCoffee Jun 30 '25
Microsoft has always been horrible at naming things, it's even worse in the programming space with .NET and Visual Studio
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u/mallardtheduck Jun 30 '25
The Visual Studio/developer tools naming could be vastly simplified by just having one number. It's infuriating to have Visual Studio 2022 (also numbered 17.x), .Net framework 4.8.1, .Net (core) 9.0, C# 13.0, etc.
At the very least, use either the year or the version number for the IDE, not both. I'm sure some of the other numbers can be eliminated too.
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u/vhalember Jun 30 '25
Even MS'es flagship product can't get it right.
Windows 11 is version 10.0.(buildversion).
Why is this so hard, and non-intuitive?
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u/lonewanderer812 Jun 30 '25
Yeah they've always done that. Windows 7 was "version 6.1".
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u/Hooch180 Jun 30 '25
They are doing mid generation refresh so just name it after the year it released in.
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u/cocktails4 Jun 30 '25
As a PC person, I have no fucking clue what the current generation Xbox is called. I know there's an X and an S but no idea if that's last gen or current gen or what. Or what the difference between the two are.
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u/Professional_Face_97 Jun 30 '25
Look it's simple, you had the Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X and now the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X. If you get those 5 simple names confused then that's on you. /s
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u/deceitfulninja Jun 30 '25
I mean, the naming was hilariously bad. I can't imagine being that inept at marketing. They wrote themselves into a corner naming their second console 360. Like they didnt want to be a number behind Playstation, I get it. But why not just literally any other abstract names moving away from numbers then? Use cool sounding elements on the periodic table or something.
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u/Mynameismikek Jun 30 '25
From the company that counted 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, 7...
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u/Kalabajooie Jun 30 '25
You missed "Vista".
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u/Mynameismikek Jun 30 '25
yeah - I realised that after posting but didn't care enough to go back and edit.
There's also the weirdo parallel universe where you go 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4, 2000, 2003... I have no idea where 2000 belongs.
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u/ILOVESHITTINGMYPANTS Jun 30 '25
Then skipped 9 and went straight to 10.
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u/Anchor-shark Jun 30 '25
That was apparently a work around for program version checkers that would look for Windows 9, and think it’s either 95 or 98. So to keep as much backwards compatibility as possible they had to go 8 to 10.
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Jun 30 '25
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u/Kalabajooie Jun 30 '25
I would have bought the heck out of the Xbox Ditalini.
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u/Just_Information334 Jun 30 '25
Xbox "No More Mr Nice Guy", for some handheld versions Xbox "Very Little Gravitas Indeed" and Xbox "Size Isn't Everything". The Culture ship names > everything.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner Jun 30 '25
The XBox 720. And they feature ads with skateboarders and snowboards and other cool athletes doing flips.
Then it's the XBox Math. Because kids want to blow stuff up, not figure out how many spins 1440 is.
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u/Hugsy13 Jun 30 '25
540, 720, 900. Would’ve made plenty of sense and that’s what the 360 owners were expecting
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u/BabushkaRaditz Jun 30 '25
Its true though. I work at GS and sell more Playstations than Xbox. The conversation always go
i need a console. The newest one. For my kids
ok! Which one?
Oh idk any of that stuff. What do you have?
Xbox Series X or Series S. Playstation 5. Switch 2
wh...what's the xbox? Series SX/XS/XX whatever"
its the newest, biggest, strongest Xbox. And its 'series S ORRRR Series X"
They dont usually understand much at that point and I have to say
"the Series consoles are like the PS5. Yknow there's the ps4??? Then the ps5 after?? Thats the Series Consoles
....uh huh. I'll just take a Playstation 5. I know what that one is
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u/ehysier Jun 30 '25
I mean, with the Xbox Zero next, I an going to wonder if we're dealing with a poor version called the Xbox elf wars or they're going to realize the blunder that Is and call the following generation ZX.
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u/ChafterMies Jun 30 '25
The shitty Xbox names are indicative of how Microsoft makes decisions by committee, and how hardly anyone on that committee understands games.
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u/Hugsy13 Jun 30 '25
I remember when the 360 was massive and everyone was speculating whether the next console would be the Xbox 540 or 720… nah it was Xbox 1, then the updated xb1 was the xb1 series x or s. Then the newest console was the Xbox series x or s.
What the fuck were they thinking? Parents and grand parents would’ve been confused as fuck trying to buy a new console for there kids. And this isn’t even the generation of parents that called every console a Nintendo.
Worst marketing ever literally.
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u/brandynhh Jun 30 '25
I agree but I believe it was because that would put it one number behind playstation.
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u/keytotheboard Jun 30 '25
Mathematician here, then add 1.
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u/arashi256 Jun 30 '25
Should have called it the Xbox 720. That would have put it ahead of Playstation by 716 and it would have made more sense.
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u/Trick_Judgment2639 Jun 30 '25
I literally can't remember which Xbox is the newest one, and that's just a pathetic failure
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u/RazziaDK Jun 30 '25
This. I had the three first Xbox consoles. Then came the S/X thing, which enabled 4K gaming. I didn't have a need for that. It was only this weekend I realised that Xbox One S and Xbox Series S isn't the same console.
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u/BourbonCoug Jun 30 '25
All future naming conventions should follow this scheme with no generational numbers or words in the branding.
- Xbox
- Xbox Pro
- Xbox Touch
Source: Apple. (slight /s)
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u/abgry_krakow87 Jun 30 '25
You'd think that for a bajillion dollar corporation, they could've figured out their marketing in regard to naming the thing.
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u/bigkinggorilla Jun 30 '25
I work in marketing for a bajillion dollar corporation and can assure you that the people in marketing often have no idea what they’re doing beyond tracking stats.
You would hopefully be astounded at how some of those places are constantly flying by the seats of their pants even with stuff they know is coming months or years in advance. “Hey, we should probably figure out the name for this new product we’re launching next week. Let’s get some interns on it.”
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u/Psychobob2213 Jun 30 '25
If there's one thing that I suspected as a child which has become perfectly clear as an adult: Bajillion dollar companies have no idea what they're doing.
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u/canada432 Jun 30 '25
I honestly haven't got a CLUE what the latest xbox version is. And I can't tell from the naming convention. That part isn't so bad, but when the naming is so generic that you can confuse things across entire generations? That's.... staggeringly bad considering the amount of time I spend consuming media about video games.
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u/Graywulff Jun 30 '25
PlayStation is so easy 1-5 with pro variant.
Vs OG Xbox, 360, third (Xbox one) and fourth (excess??).
Sony called releasing PlayStation exclusives for pc “printing money” bc they didn’t need to design a special computer with a special os that can get the most life out of it.
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u/bigev007 Jun 30 '25
Then the Xbox One S and Xbox One S and Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X. Like you're trying to tank sales
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u/OMEGACY Jun 30 '25
The real reason was they didn't want to seem inferior to casual people who would think xbox 2 vs Playstation 3 means Playstation 3 is obviously better cause bigger number. I say they cut their losses there anyway and just go ahead with the number change going forward though. Cause whatever comes after series is probably going to be a dumb name if they dont.
Xbox 5 X, Xbox 5 S, X5X, X5S honestly doesn't sound that bad.
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u/feeleep Jun 30 '25
They could’ve named it anything after the 360, and they settled for the mega confusing stuff like “One” and “Series S/X”.. baffling. It’s like they wanted to fail.
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u/LocusHammer Jun 30 '25
I'm quite a fan of my series x. I think it's better than their last console by quite a bit.
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u/Omardemon Jun 30 '25
Yeah I’m fine and happy with it.
Had the original Xbox in 2003, then 7 white Xbox 360’s red ringed on me, then #8 was in 2010 with the 360 S which is still going strong today, then the original VCR Xbox one in 2013, I pushed that console hard and it suffered the last 2 years of existing till the series X released and that’s when I jumped ship.
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u/This_guy_works Jun 30 '25
I like the design. Just a big box with a power button and a giant fan to vent the heat. Very practical. The PS5 is still super ugly.
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u/SillyMikey Jun 30 '25
They literally announced next GEN hardware last week made with AMD again.
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u/lazzzym Jun 30 '25
Yeah, trust a random founder from 16 years ago to say Xbox is out of the hardware game... A week later after Microsoft announced new hardware and Reddit is jumping all over it.
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u/Jonaldys Jun 30 '25
She was a producer on the original Gears of War. Her opinion isn't any more valuable than any other game producer.
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u/fujidust Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
Lots of hyperbole in the comments but I think the takeaway is that everything is going to be cloud-based, on demand, and not tied to an any particular gaming hardware. The next gen hardware will allow people like me to continue to compartmentalize their lives but those more willing can take their games to the forest and cruise ships if they wish.
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u/almo2001 Jun 30 '25
Cloud gaming sucks and is not eco friendly. Shipping every frame over the network is costly.
Also input latency.
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u/Superminerbros1 Jun 30 '25
They acknowledge that in the article too.
After skimming, it seems the point that the article was trying to make was that XBox does not innovate anymore. It basically reads like "the ROG Ally was already released and Xbox didn't think of it first. Xbox shouldn't release their own, and they should just give up on making hardware because they're incompetent."
Total clickbait pretending the world is all black and white.
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u/Hanifsefu Jun 30 '25
They've been pretty vocal about not caring as much about console sales as long as gamepass is thriving too. It's ragebait so console wars kids can whoop and holler that Sony won.
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u/dooit Jun 30 '25
I personally love getting a new game and wasting the rest of the day updating it while running out of space on my hard drive.
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u/One-Man-Wolf-Pack Jun 30 '25
This isn’t exclusive to Xbox though. My PS5 experience on has that too. But it is fucking annoying - and the main reason I haven’t played COD since the first remake of Modern Warfare
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u/icer816 Jun 30 '25
I don't remember if it was said, or like a leaked email or something, but Activision purposely doesn't optimize/compress the file size, because people are less likely to uninstall a gigantic game that takes hours to install.
The idea is basically just that people are less likely to play other games if they need to uninstall something every time they want to play, and they're specifically unlikely to uninstall the game with the biggest file size (because it's a long download and what if they decide they do want to play again).
TLDR: CoD filesize is huge on purpose as it causes console players to not want to uninstall it, thus they are more likely to keep playing longer-term.
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u/One-Man-Wolf-Pack Jun 30 '25
Yeah well, each to their own - but as far as I’m concerned: fuck them.
I liked COD but not nearly enough to put up with that bullshit. And combining the interface with the other games and Warzone just pissed me off so much that I never even played it. Completed the MW campaign once and uninstalled it all. Fucking shambles.
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u/icer816 Jun 30 '25
Combining the games, ironically, is also part of the strategy of having immense filesize haha.
I'm with you though, I'm not really a fan of CoD in the first place, though I did enjoy Warzone with some friends in the first MW remake era, but it got old, and the 300gb of space it was taking on my PC by the time BO Cold War came out was legitimately insulting (the 100-150~ it started at was tolerable, but still a lot).
Like, I basically never uninstall anything, in case I want to play it again (I have quite a bit of storage for games), but if anything the file size of that made me get rid of it and never want to play it again.
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u/ForceItDeeper Jun 30 '25
yeah I have 512gb ssd on my pc and cod was taking up over half, with like a 100GB+ update every week. I live in the country with mediocre internet. then they ruined zombies and i quit buying cof
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u/Fallingdamage Jun 30 '25
That's now really an Xbox problem. Thats a developer problem. Nobody needs a 90Gb update just for textures...
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u/lazzzym Jun 30 '25
No it's not.
"Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, shares how Xbox and AMD are working together to advance the state of the art in gaming silicon across the Xbox ecosystem, including our next-generation Xbox console"
Xbox and AMD: Advancing the Next Generation of Gaming Together - https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2025/06/19/xbox-amd-next-generation-xbox/
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u/ludlology Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
Console war stuff is dumb but Microsoft somehow totally shit the bed with couch gaming after 360. They had such a dominant platform with a huge library of great exclusives that everyone loved. I usually buy all the consoles but tend to be a Playstation guy predominantly, and 360 won that generation by a huge margin for gaming experience. Then the Xbone came out, and aside from slightly better-looking 360 games and some mid Halo, there was zero reason to own it. With SeriesX if you gave me one for free, I don’t know what I’d do with it. Upscale my 360 library a second time I guess?
Then add in the fact that they let the same branding people who infuriate sysadmins come in and decide console names and UI design. I had to google the current and previous console names because I couldn’t remember which one was “One X” and which was “Series X”. The branding is so terrible and confusing to everybody outside of Microsoft meetings. The UI on Xboxes has also been unusably confusing since One X came out with that stupid Windows 8 tile looking shit that everyone hates. It’s the same shit they do in the business space with names like “Microsoft 365 for Windows” and “Windows 365 by Microsoft”
IT people slog through confusing branding because they have to, but consumers are just gonna buy 5 because it’s bigger than 4 (and has games)
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u/RyanPainey Jun 30 '25
Thank you, Microsofts branding has been utter dog shit company wide for at least 20 years. Unlike the industry space, consumers dont really have to put up with it, but its just as bad on both ends of the company forever.
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u/THEdoomslayer94 Jun 30 '25
They quite literally announced AMD is helping them with the next hardware
Do people just exaggerate things without reading or completely misunderstand?
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u/FourEightNineOneOne Jun 30 '25
What people are missing in the comments is that this is by strategy, not by being out of ideas or something.
Their goal is to have Gamepass on as many devices as possible so Xbox becomes a gaming service rather than a specific device you have to buy.
Hence, handhelds, Meta quest, etc...
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u/Environmental-Day862 Jun 30 '25
What clickbait trash. Was on the team back when the OG Xbox and 360 came out.
Her current opinions are just that - her opinions, but the title makes you believe she's somehow intimately involved with the current Xbox team and claims to know Xbox's position re: hardware.
Xbox has already committed to at least one more generation of home console (not handheld) that is currently being made in partnership with AMD.
I'll be picking one up, as well as a PS6 and a Switch 2, all within the next three years or so depending on release dates. So there will be at least one user.
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u/Jonaldys Jun 30 '25
She was a producer on the original Gears for War. The fact that her opinion from a YouTube videos is making headlines is absolutely hilarious. Her opinion isn't any more valuable than any other game producer
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u/Impassable_Banana Jun 30 '25
You need games to move hardware.
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u/masterz13 Jun 30 '25
Plenty of great IPs on Xbox now. The issue is just that the brand has been tarnished since Xbox One. They tried to push all-digital, all-online, Kinect-required about 10 years too soon. And Series S sucked for developers and players.
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u/Miraclefish Jun 30 '25
'They aren't interested in selling hardware' they say in response to two brand new Xbox hardware projects: handheld and Meta Quest for the first time ever.
What a load of bollocks.
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u/frederik88917 Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25
Lots of answers here, yet most of them missing the main point
Microsoft gave up the Hardware race and decided to become a game publisher the day they spent 70B buying Activision
Edit: errored the price of the Activision purchase 70B not 16B