When it comes to making consoles, every single console maker has its ups and downs. That includes brands like Nintendo, Sony, and especially Microsoft. It’s impossible for someone to make a consistent line of consoles that never have a “slip-up” because there are things outside of the console maker’s control that can affect sales and so on. In the case of the Xbox 360, many see that as likely the best console that Microsoft ever made. It had great graphics, an incredibly strong lineup of gaming titles, and so on. Yet, as noted by the former head of the Xbox line, that console almost single-handedly doomed them all.
The man behind that statement is Peter Moore, a longtime industry veteran who has worked for some of the biggest companies around, including Microsoft. In a chat with The Game Business, Moore explained that the infamous “Red Ring of Death” almost killed them because of what it took to fix it. If you weren’t around for that back then, the “Red Ring of Death” was the term for a mysterious light that would happen on Xbox 360 models at random times during their lives. If you got it, you couldn’t play the console, and you had to send it to Microsoft for it to be fixed, which meant you wouldn’t be playing games for a while:
“It took us a while to figure out what was going on. Were the fans in the right place? […] Trying to figure out whether, you know, […] wrapping the towel around it would create more heat, which would rejoin some of the issues of the cracks in some of the units. All of this was going on, and it was stressful. But the one thing I will always say is, you know, this was, for us, a defining moment. If we hadn’t done what we did, I’m not sure the Xbox brand would be around today.”
He’s not wrong; the costs did exceed a billion to get them all fixed, but they were fixed, and people kept buying the 360, which meant that Xbox was literally “still in the game.”
However, while they were able to dodge that bullet, they didn’t dodge the ones that came out later, including with the current Xbox line, which has sold WELL below what they thought it would, and after the recent gaming layoffs, many wonder if Xbox should even release another console!
History happens in cycles at times, and we may be seeing that here in the near future.
