On December 22, 2005 he disembarked Xbox 360 in the United States, the second incursion of Microsoft in the video game market as a console manufacturer, doing the same a few days later in European and Japanese territory. Xbox 360 It was accompanied by various titles at its launch, among which we can highlight Call of Duty 2, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Kameo: Elements of Power, Perfect Dark Zero y Project Gotham Racing 3.
The launch of the console was somewhat harrowing and against the clock: Microsoft began mass production of Xbox 360 just 69 days before your arrival in stores. For this reason, there were not enough units to meet the demand for the new desktop machine, especially in the United States and Europe, while Japan, from the outset, resisted the supply of Microsoft and waited for the movements of Sony with its PlayStation 3.
Xbox 360 It had great hardware that the developers soon became familiar with: it had a Xenon CPU de IBM and a ATI Xenos GPU, which represented a more than remarkable leap from the level we saw in the previous generation of consoles. Although many of the early games that came to Xbox 360 they could be considered as intergenerational and it took time to appear programs that really demonstrated what that machine was capable of.
When the console already had a good user base, the first ones began to emerge hardware problems. At first, there was talk of isolated cases, but quickly the evil of the call spread circle of death y Microsoft he had in his hands a bomb that could explode and destroy the brand Xbox. To those of Redmond, given the scope of the incident, they had no choice but to offer an extra year of warranty on the console, a gesture that cost them more than billion dollars. At the time, some sources pointed out that the problem of Red lights was due to poor hardware planning as Microsoft it skipped the appropriate quality controls to be able to arrive on time for the 2005 Christmas campaign. Subsequently, numerous revisions of the console took place, with changes in the hardware, hard disk capacity and aesthetic finish, in order to offer the customer a more reliable system.
For many gamers, one of the greatest successes of the console was the community created around Xbox Live, the online gaming platform of Microsoft, which discriminated between paying users, the so-called Gold, and the Silver. Despite the refusal of Sony in that generation of charging for playing online, later, as we have seen in PlayStation 4, succumbed to the payment model with its particular system PlayStation Plus, of which in addition, Microsoft, would take into account certain peculiarities, such as delivery of games to paying customers.
Another of the strengths of Xbox 360 that many will mention will be their Control command. It was a more ergonomic and comfortable evolution of the controllerS from the previous Xbox, with better distributed buttons, improved triggers, guide button and wireless signal. However, the great weakness of the first controls was a somewhat rigid and imprecise crosshead, but like the console, the controller of Xbox 360 it was subjected to as many revisions. The popularity of the command was such that it was launched in PC, with great compatibility and support from the developers who used their programs for this platform.
Another important piece of hardware in the life of Xbox 360 was the introduction of Kinect. In the first presentations of the peripheral, we were told about it as a revolution in the world of video games, thanks to an immersion capacity never seen before - do you remember Milo? Surely not - already infinite possibilities. In the end, those words were blown away by the wind, the catalog for Kinect it was reduced to a series of casual games and the gadget ended up gathering dust in some corner of the users' house. Subsequently, there was a retry to reintroduce this technology to the consumer through Xbox One, but the answer was so negative, that Microsoft began to quietly corner Kinect.
If we have to talk about exclusive software, the titles only for for Xbox 360 They were classified in two aspects: exclusive only on consoles oetotal exclusivity. They gave much to talk about Mass Effect o BioShock when they were released on other platforms, or criticism PC versions de Alan WakeGears of War o Fable III. But focusing on the experiences that could only offer us Xbox 360, we should highlight programs like Halo 3, Halo Reach, Halo 4, Ace Combat 6, Blue Dragon, Crackdown, Dead Rising, the different Forza Motorsport, the original trilogy of Gears of War, Alan Wake, Kameo, Lost Odyssey o Project Gotham Racing 4.
Of the wide catalog of the console, the games that sold more than 6 million copies were the following:
- Kinect Adventures - 21.63 million
- Grand Theft Auto V - 15.60 million
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - 14.59 million
- Call of Duty: Black Ops - 14.41 million
- Call of Duty: Black Ops II - 13.49 million
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - 13.44 million
- Minecraft - 13 million
- Halo 3 - 12.06 million
- Halo 4 - 9.41 million
- Gears of War 2 - 6.74 million
Xbox 360 could stand up to PlayStation 3 thanks to the excessive confidence and arrogance of Sony. The price of the console Microsoft turned out to be much more accessible to the average consumer - remember that PS3 jumped into $600 and without even including a game - programmers got used to an architecture that was not as complex as the Cell and during its early years we came across a large catalog of games. However, the final stretch of the console's life was quite questionable, with a major drought of triple-A exclusive titles and a Microsoft too focused on expanding Xbox Live and in getting into Kinect with a funnel. Still with everything, and despite the way it came back sony xbox 360 managed to achieve sales figures that nobody suspected back in November 2005, especially after those two generations of brand dominance PlayStation.