In early 2024, I pitched a story to my editors at Digital Trends titled "Xbox is Dead." At the time, rumors were swirling that tons of Xbox exclusives would be making their way to PlayStation, including hits like Indiana Jones, Halo, and Gears of War. Then, the ball dropped, and the struggling company announced that it had named its first two exclusives to go multiplatform: HiFi Rush and Pentiment.
The Xbox execs promised this didn't mean anything, and that Xbox was doing great and that tons of great games were on the way and that Xbox was still the greatest name in gaming and that it was just the start of a new great era that was even greater than the previous greatness of Xbox… They also snuck in a little line about how, if the games sell well on other platforms, they’d continue doing it.
Anyone with a brain could see where that was going. When you have almost triple the number of PlayStations than Xboxes, it is virtually impossible for a game not to sell better on PS5 than Xbox. This was, in a sly little PR-spun way, Xbox admitting to the world that it was dying. At that moment in February 2024, they told us that their exclusive games were gone.
On top of that, their console sales are been abysmal, and they keep raising prices. And yet, for some reason, Xbox keeps denying that anything is wrong, and continues this strange narrative that they will indeed make a 10th generation console…which will be, according to them, their best ever!
But Xbox players like me are fed up. We’ve been given that whole “Xbox is soooooo close to being that thing you’ve always wanted it to be!” line for over a decade now, and we no longer believe it. So, how did Xbox get here? Let’s take a closer look.
Step 1: Have a horrible decade
Xbox’s problems began long before 2025. In fact, it goes back about 10 years to the launch of the Xbox One. The Xbox One had a big problem – games. Or, to be more precise, a lack of games. If you look at the console’s seven-year lifespan, there were some hits, like Sea of Thieves and Quantum Break. But it’s important to remember that in real-time, having a hit game arrive once every few years is not enough to sustain a console. Especially when your competitors are scoring numerous hit games each year.
By the time 2020 arrived and we entered the 9th generation with the Xbox X/S, the company already had a reputation for being inferior to PlayStation. But, Xbox assured us that great things were about to happen. We were promised tons of great games and groundbreaking AAA titles. But it turns out that, for the most part, those were empty promises.
On the good end, we got games like Starfield, which ended up coming out seven years late. On the bad end, we have games like Everwild and the Perfect Dark reboot, which were completely cancelled. And then there’s all the games like Ark 2 and Fable that are (allegedly) still happening, but keep getting their release dates pushed back, so honestly, nobody really knows what’s going on with them.
All of this led to a culture where we the gamers gave up on Xbox, because Xbox let us down over and over again with empty promises that never materialized.
Step 2: Watch console sales tank…but raise prices!
Xbox no longer releases console sales numbers, which is another one of those PR-swing type ways to say, “We aren't selling consoles and we’re embarrassed to say it.”
However, Microsoft does announce its quarterly earnings, which constantly show that Xbox consoles are failing. Most recently, they reported that console sales dropped 30% in 2025. Even worse, that’s a decline on top of a decline. As GameSpot reported in January 2025, Xbox already saw a 38% drop in console sales in 2024.
Normally, this would put a company in crisis mode. Your product isn't selling. That's not good. We can all agree on that, right? But if you’re Xbox, apparently, you decide to raise the price of your already-five-year-old console that isn’t selling and increase the price of GamePass. Now, if you buy an Xbox X and subscribe to GamePass Ultimate (the tier that gets all the good games), you’ll be spending $960 in your first year alone…and $360 every year that follows. Oh, and that’s assuming you buy the all-digital Xbox X and don’t buy any non-GamePass games. If you want a disk drive or games that aren’t on Game Pass, you’ll just have to keep adding $$$ to that amount.
Step 3: Pretend everything is fine
The weirdest part about this whole thing is that Xbox just doesn't seem to get it. Despite no longer having exclusive games and not selling consoles, the company continues to insist that they’re in a great spot and are super excited about their upcoming 10th-gen console. But who wants it? Why would it even exist?
If they wanted to go the SEGA route and become a publisher, that would make more sense. Or, if they wanted to just focus on Game Pass and be the Netflix of gaming, that would also make (some) sense. But why put your games on other consoles and watch your console sales fall off a cliff…and then still assume you’re in the console business? Xbox, listen to me, you are NOT ok.
Step 4: Take publicity wherever you can find it, even if it’s bad
One of the most glaring examples of how much trouble Xbox is in was when the Trump administration created two Halo memes right after it was announced that Halo was going multiplatform.
The first was one of those weird, cheap AI images that Trump loves so much, of him dressed as Master Chief in front of the White House, despite the government shutdown. The second was even worse, showing an UNSC warthog being used in an ICE recruitment tweet that read “Destroy the flood.” Let that sink in….The US government called immigrants “the flood,' a race of pus-filled, tentacle-laden, parasitic aliens that kill humans and take over their bodies.
Even worse, Microsoft declined to comment when publications like The Verge reached out, meaning they had a chance to condemn the action, but literally refused to. At this point, Xbox is in one of two spots. Either they’re so desperate for publicity that they’ll take anything, or they know they’ve lost every logical person after years of bullshit and are now targeting the angry MAGA middle-aged incel crowd because, at this point, that’s all they’re ever going to get. Either way, the company has clearly reached a point of desperation, and it just looks sad and pathetic.
Step 5: Have no plan for the future
Despite everything going wrong all the time, Xbox seems content. Yes, their sales suck. But they seem ok with that. And yes, they have nothing but bad publicity. But that seems to be just fine. Instead of trying to understand why nobody is buying their consoles and why Game Pass is losing subscribers, they seem to be pretty content. Perhaps they’re just too busy planning what they’ll wear to Trump’s new ballroom.
They don’t seem to have any desire to change, despite failing at every turn. They are now confusingly a console-maker-game-publisher-online-subscription-service. And just like any restaurant with a huge menu, instead of doing something really well, they’re doing a lot…and not doing any of it well. Without the billions of dollars from Microsoft funding their losses, could Xbox be what it is today? And more importantly, what is Xbox today? It seems they don’t even know.