Spencer came in, he really made a major effort to start putting a lot of energy into backwards compatibility, and when you think about where Xbox was in 2014, 2015, it made a lot of sense. Sony had pretty much completely abandoned any hope of backwards compatibility for the PlayStation 4, short of something like PlayStation Now, which I mean, if you wanna pay to stream last gen games, sure, have fun, but they knew that this was something that could make a real difference. This ultimately came to fruition pretty quickly at E3 2015, so this was two years after the initial launch of the Xbox One, they announced that they were bringing Xbox 360 games to the platform and pretty quickly the games were coming in at a very rapid rate.

And the important thing was, was that your current Xbox 360 disc that you could buy for a dollar each at GameStop could be dropped with your Xbox One, and after a quick download or maybe slightly longer download, but importantly after a free download, you'll be up and running with your Xbox One, playing your good old classic 360 titles. Over the last five years, they've expanded the amount of not only 360 titles, but have also supported some original Xbox games on the Xbox One.

As well as things like the Xbox One X can run some of these titles at much higher resolutions that were far better than the original console, it's very impressive and ultimately, as we look toward the next generation, all of the work that Microsoft put in to that backwards compatibility is being ported over almost entirely to the Xbox Series X. Sure, the PlayStation 5, will be able to play some PS4 games, but there's a difference between some of your previous games versus the Xbox Series X, which can claim that it can almost play every single Xbox game ever regardless of which platform it was made for.

Now, if we're talking legacy, one of the things that was introduced with the Xbox One's generation is Xbox Game Pass, now if you're not familiar, this is essentially Microsoft's attempt at building the Netflix of gaming. So, from anywhere from five to $15 a month, based on your plan, you get access to hundreds of games on Xbox, on PC, you get things like streaming games via xCloud, as well as things like Xbox Live Gold all bundled in.

And these aren't just sort of cheap whatever games, you're getting high-quality, top-tier titles like Halo Infinite, like Forza, Gears, Flight Simulator as well as a lot of other third-party titles. Now, to me, I think this is really where the Xbox brand goes forward, who cares if they sell you an Xbox Series X or an Xbox One or a PC, whatever the case is, I think Microsoft are going to make their money on selling you the subscription to the game pass.

And then honestly, as a consumer, I think it's a pretty good deal. So, the thing is no one is going to look back on the Xbox One and consider it to be a successful console. Sure, it wasn't a huge failure, like some other major consoles of the past, when you look at it side by side with other Xboxes, sure, it did outsell the original Xbox, but it came nowhere near selling the same amount of units as the Xbox 360.

And when you look at it side by side with the PlayStation 4, it was outsold over two to one. But with a console like the Xbox One X retaking the world's most powerful console crown and later the Xbox Series X holding onto that crown, I do think Microsoft has pretty much completed their apology tour and have finally gotten the Xbox brand back to where it was in the good old days of the Xbox 360.

The Xbox One didn't have a smooth run of it, but it did make a lot of huge leaps forward, which while maybe wasn't enough to save the console itself, at the very least puts the Xbox brand as well as the Xbox Series X in good shape going forward and it's hard to argue with building versus giving up.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- Thanks to LastPass for sponsoringa portion of this video.Definitely be sure tocheck them out at the linkin the description.This is why the Xbox One failed.- Now, I'm so excited to announcethat Xbox One will launchthis November in 21 marketsaround the world at $499in the US...- Did you catch that?That was the moment rightthere that sealed the fateof the Xbox One, a few short hours later,Sony announced the more powerfuland cheaper PlayStation 4and with one simple video,they cemented their dominanceover the generation ofconsoles, what went wrong?Now that we're on the cuspof a new console generationit's easy to forget thatthere actually was a lotthat the Xbox One brought to the table.Now, when you look back atthe Xbox 360, it was of coursemassively successful and still to this daythe most popular Xbox of all time,but it went about thingsin a very different waythan the Xbox One, whereMicrosoft opted to gofor a little bit of a saferstrategy and they chose AMDto build not only the CPU but also the GPUin one contained SoC.Essentially this meant thatthe Xbox One was for allintents and purposes very, very similarto a Windows gaming PC.For years, PC gamerscomplained that the Xbox 360and PlayStation 3 were holding them back,and there was a lot of truth to that.So, not only were theseconsoles based on very differentarchitectures, but ultimatelythey were only runningwith about a half a gigabyte of memory,which especially when youconsider what kind of gameswere able to be pulled offwith such a tiny amount of RAMand running off of DVD drives,it is kind of incredible.But there is no doubt that for years,those consoles were reallyholding back the PC space,both Sony and Microsoftchose AMD to build their nextgeneration, but they're alsopretty heavily constrained.Remember, this is AMDbefore the days of Ryzenthat we of course are getting on this nextgeneration of consoles.Instead, AMD at the time on the desktop,were pushing theirBulldozer based FX CPU's,which sucked I think wouldbe a nice way of putting it,which really meant that theonly thing that was reallysuitable for a console weretheir much smaller and muchweaker Jaguar mobile-based CPU cores.This in many scenarios meantthat the brand new eight-corechips inside the PS4 andXbox One, were actually notas powerful as the CPU's onthe Xbox 360 and specificallyon the PlayStation 3.So, tradeoffs, tradeoffs.Thankfully graphics is anarea where the Xbox Onewas a much bigger step forward,but the problem was overon the Sony side of the fence,they had bet very heavilyon the faster but moreexpensive GDDR5 Memory.The problem was was thatbecause this was so expensivefor quite a while Sony expectedto only be able to shipfour gigabytes of RAM and hereMicrosoft saw an advantage.If they could ship eight gigs of RAM,which was a little bitslower on the Xbox One,they will have an advantage, right?Well, yes, except that Sonywas able to ship eight gigsof GDDR5, meaning that theyhad parody on the actual amountof memory and the Xbox Onewas stuck with a GPU whichwas much smaller because theyhad to build an ESRAM bufferinto it, they had theslower RAM, it was a littlebit more difficult to workwith, it was a bet that justdidn't pay off and it meantthat the entire historyof the Xbox One has had ittrailing pretty significantlythe performance of thePlayStation 4, which let's notforget, it was alsocheaper at the same time.So, E3 2013, was my veryfirst E3 and that was the showwhere both the Xbox One andPlayStation 4 was shown offfor the very first time.Or at least technically theXbox One did have a briefinga couple of weeks before,but it was basically an hourand a half of TV, TV, TV, TV,TV, TV, TV, oh, by the way,this thing plays games, but have you heardabout the TV features?It didn't help thatthe Xbox One had a kindof lackluster launch lineup.Sure, games like Forza lookedgreat, when you look atthat side by side side withsome of the other majortitles like Sunset Overdriveand Ryse: Son of Rome,those were pretty lookinggames, they were fun,but they weren't really console sellers,especially when you put thatalongside the fact that whileMicrosoft had a huge leadwith Indie developers backon the Xbox Live Arcade days,by the time the Xbox Onecame out, that was prettymuch completely thrown away,and guess who was there toscoop up all those Indies?Of course, it was Sony andtheir brand new PlayStation 4.Kinda see where I'm going with this one.Probably the biggestissue was around Xboxes,very aggressive DRM strategy.So the first thing was allgames even the physical oneswere tied to your Xbox live account.Now, that on the surface mightnot seem like a bad thingobviously all of ourdigital games do that today,however, the problem wasthat even the physical DVDthat you would have gone outand bought in physical Blu-Ray,that would have beentied to you permanently.So that meant a couple ofthings, and there were someupsides, so for example, youcould share with up to 10of your family members andyou could actually sharean Xbox game with one ofyour Xbox Live friends.Now you had to do that onlyonce so you couldn't justbe constantly swapping backand forth, and it had to bein their possession for at least 30 days,but that was theoretically a cool feature.The problem though, wasthat you had to be onlineevery 24 hours so the thingis, this was where a lotof people got very upsetbecause before the Xbox Onehad actually been announced,Microsoft had kinda madesome waves, I'm like, oh no,it won't be always online,and then they immediatelywere like, oh yeah,it's always online.By far the biggest issuethough, was no trade inskind of, okay, so the rule was publishers,the individual gamepublishers can actually choosewhat they wanted to allow youto do with the physical gamesthat you bought, so obviouslyright now in the ultimatepolicy was that you buy it, you sell it,it's just super simple.But back in the Xbox One,when they first announced it,essentially if a publisherwanted to, they could say,oh, you know what?That physical copy youcan never sell it again,it can never bereactivated by anyone ever.Or alternatively, they couldhave charged you 10, 20 bucks,whatever they wanted toreactivate that code for the game.This, I don't need to tellyou when over just aboutas well as you might expected.Ultimately this meant thatthe head of Xbox at the time,Don Mattrick was very swiftly fired,like within a couple of weeksof this first E3 presentation.And with that, the XboxOne while it was nowon a much better path theypretty much walked back allof these to the policiesthat we know today,but the Xbox One was startingout from absolutely horrendousposition, more expensive, not as powerful,the entire internet hating them,I mean all of the good willthat they had built up throughoutthe Xbox 360 generationwas gone in the matterof a couple of weeks.Before we continue, I haveto give a huge shout outto LastPass for sponsoringthis portion of the video,with LastPass you neverneed to write, rememberor reset another password,not only will it help youkeep all of your currentpasswords nice, safe and secure,but on top of that it willeven help you generatebrand new ones.It works pretty much everywhere,including on your computeras well as on mobile with iOSand Android so that LastPasscan fill in your username and passwordso that you don't have to.So, LastPass is availablefor free, however,for $3 a month, you canupgrade to LastPass premium,which brings you some additional features,including some advanced twostep authentication options,which is something that Ipersonally use all the time.So, I have been a LastPassuser for almost 10 years now,I've been paying for thatentire time and it is reallytruly a service that Ibelieve in, and I'm so happythat LastPass is asupporter of the channel.So, if you guys want to up yourpassword game and make surethat you're nice, safe and securedefinitely be sure to headto the link in the descriptionto check out LastPass,and again, huge shout outto LastPass for not onlykeeping me safe, butimportantly also sponsoringthis portion of the video.Another aspect that waspoorly received is Kinect.Now, it's easy to forgettoday, but when Kinectfirst launched on the Xbox360, it was wildly successful,and it really gave a lotof new life to the 360,which is almost fiveyears old at that point.So not only it was naturalthat when Microsoft decidedto start designing that Xbox One,they put a lot of emphasis on Kinect 2.0,except they maybe put alittle too much emphasison the new version of Kinect.Now I actually really likedKinect, sure it was a littlebit big and bulky, butyou could absolutely saythe same thing about the Xbox One,and the voice recognitionfeatures were actually reallyuseful, I mean you'vegot to have to rememberthat this was years beforethings like Google Assistant,as well as Siri and Alexa hadkind of completely taken oversort of the smart home ecosystem.Now, the actual camerafunctions I think were a littlebit more on the gimmicky sideyes, it was higher fidelityand there were somegames that supported it,but generally speaking theactual usefulness of Kinecthas mostly been relegated to like ghosthunting these days.Really though, Kinect wasemblematic of a larger overallissue with the Xbox One, itwas just simply trying to dotoo many things at onceand because of that,pretty much everything suffered.So for example, whenthe Xbox first came outand they had their famous TV,TV, TV sort of presentation,they focused obviously veryheavily on the media functions.Some of which were cool, butthings like the HDMI inputto allow you to routesomething like your cable box into function as a DVRwere theoretically cool,but it was never fully realized,and ultimately scrappedseveral years into theXbox One's life cycle.Less than a year afterthe Xbox One launched,they removed the requirementthat you always had to useKinect and then startedactually selling an Xbox Onewithout it included in the box at all,bring the price down to $400and finally reaching priceparity with the PlayStation 4.It was a start, but theystill had a long way to go.The next major focus they had,was backwards compatibility.Now, this is actually somethingthat Microsoft had laidthe groundwork for yearsbefore the Xbox Onehad even shipped, andwhen you look at the waythat they approached it asopposed to a company like Sony,it was very, very different.So, say when the PS2 came out,the way it was able to playPlayStation 1 games, wasby physically includingthe processor from thePlayStation 1 on board.It was the same thingfor the launch PS3's,with the Xbox One, Microsoft had an ideathat that is what they wantedto do from a very early time.So, they actually did somethings like building in someof the core functions of the Xbox 360,like the texture processinginto the Xbox One chipfrom day one.So, when speaking withpeople on the Xbox team,specifically on thebackwards compatibility sideof the house, it's interestingto see just how much workthey've put into this.So, as soon as Phil Spencer came in,he really made a majoreffort to start putting a lotof energy into backwards compatibility,and when you think aboutwhere Xbox was in 2014, 2015,it made a lot of sense.Sony had pretty much completely abandoned,any hope of backwards compatibilityfor the PlayStation 4,short of something likePlayStation Now, which I mean,I guess if you wanna payto stream last gen games,sure, have fun, but theyknew that this was somethingthat could make a real difference.This ultimately came to fruitionpretty quickly at E3 2015,so this was two years afterthe initial launch of the XboxOne, they announced that theywere bringing Xbox 360 gamesto the platform and prettyquickly the games were comingin at a very rapid rate.And the important thing was,this was true backwards compatibility.Sure, a lot of these Xbox360 games were being soldvia Xbox Live, but the main thing was,was that your current Xbox360 disc that you could buyfor a dollar each atGameStop could be droppedwith your Xbox One, andafter a quick downloador maybe slightly longerdownload, but importantlyafter a free download,you'll be up and runningwith your Xbox One, playing your goodold classic 360 titles.Over the last five years,they've expanded the amountof not only 360 titles, buthave also supported someoriginal Xbox games on the Xbox One.As well as things like the XboxOne X can run some of thesetitles at much higherresolutions that were far betterthan the original console,it's very impressiveand ultimately, as we looktoward the next generation,all of the work that Microsoftput in to that backwardscompatibility is beingported over almost entirelyto the Xbox Series X.Sure, the PlayStation5, will be able to playsome PS4 games, but there'sa difference between someof your previous gamesversus the Xbox Series X,which can claim that it canalmost play every single Xboxgame ever regardless of whichplatform it was made for.Now, if we're talkinglegacy, one of the thingsthat was introduced withthe Xbox One's generationis Xbox Game Pass, nowif you're not familiar,this is essentiallyMicrosoft's attempt at buildingthe Netflix of gaming.So, from anywhere fromfive to $15 a month,based on your plan, you getaccess to hundreds of gameson Xbox, on PC, you getthings like streaming gamesvia xCloud, as well asthings like Xbox Live Goldall bundled in.And these aren't just sortof cheap whatever gamesyou're getting highquality, top tier titleslike Halo Infinite, likeForza, Gears, Flight Simulatoras well as a lot ofother third party titles.Now, to me, I think this isreally where the Xbox brandgoes forward, who cares ifthey sell you an Xbox Series Xor an Xbox One or a PC,whatever the case is,I think Microsoft are gonnamake their money on selling youthe subscription to the game pass.And then honestly, as a consumer,I think it's a pretty good deal.So, the thing is no oneis going to look backon the Xbox One and considerit to be a successful console.Sure, it wasn't a huge failure,like some other majorconsoles of the past,when you look at it side byside with other Xboxes, sureit did outsold the originalXbox, but it came nowherenear to selling the same amountof units as the Xbox 360,and when you look at it sideby side with the PlayStation 4,it was outsold over two to one.But with a console like theXbox One X retaking the world'smost powerful console crownand later the Xbox Series Xholding onto that crown,I do think Microsofthave pretty much completedtheir apology tourand have finally gotten theXbox brand back to whereit was in the good olddays of the Xbox 360.The Xbox One didn'thave a smooth run of it,but it did make a lotof huge leaps forward,which while maybe wasn't enoughto save the console itself,at the very least puts the Xboxbrand as well as the XboxSeries X in good shape goingforward and it's hard to arguewith building versus giving up.That was a really darkway to end the video.Thank you for watching though.Hopefully you enjoyed, makesure to subscribe for moreconsole content like this,as you might imagine plentyof news and plenty of othervideos like this are goingto be coming for many years to come.As long as I keep gettingXboxes and PlayStationsto talk about.(upbeat music)