For sure it's the end of Xbox, which has been dead to me since the start of this gen.
Xbox has struggled to establish trust and true brand dependability since the very beginning, the closest they ever came to a success was Xbox 360 - affordable hardware, solid ports, decent exclusives, XBOX Live was very influential in that era.
But now we're in the 9th gen, also known as "hell", where corporate greed and boardroom idiocy reigns and destroys everything in sight, and that goes for Sony and Nintendo too. All of these companies are subject to
enshitification, which boils down to individuals with too much money and authority over a company not being restrained at all whenever they come up with a dumb, hair-brained idea, and then it tanks the company / makes the product or service objectively worse as they continuously gas-light the public and tell us that it's actually so much better than ever.
Everything Xbox has done since 2020, I would argue is bad not only for Xbox but for console gaming, including Game Pass, the purchase of a bunch of important studious, the release of physical games with no media on them, underwhelming multiplayer trend chasing first party titles, continuous price hikes, etc. I might be sad if they hadn't turned into such bottom-feeding garbo in the past 5 years, but alas. They were always looking for the next big thing. Break into console gaming, but then spend 15 years trying to eclipse console gaming and move beyond it because the profit isn't good enough.
I'll never own a Series X, probably never own another so-called Nintendo console, and I've made peace with that. Console gaming as we knew it is going downhill fast, and we're just dinosaurs not realizing that the comets are already hitting, and it's over. The modern gaming market, save for indie gaming, is totally enshitified and begging for it's own destruction. Halo 1 the
remake, just the game that everyone was clamoring for, and that's how you know it's the 2020s.
I'm so excited. 