Don Mattrick Discusses The Failures Of The 2013 Xbox One Launch

I’m glad he didn’t have said opportunity.

Edit: and no, his team was not in a position to reasure anyone they cared about gaming when they basically killed all first party development.

@Tharsman agreed. It was around 2013 that I completely fell out of love with Xbox. It took nearly the whole generation for me to get back on board. The choices they made, the entertainment nonsense, having Usher on stage... I shudder remembering it.

Maybe should've put him in charge of an Xbox TV stick or Xbox Entertainment app, rather than gaming console. Agreed that Xbox One killed all the hype from the 360 era. I'm sure the environment they designed in was greatly focused on copying some of the broad market appeal of the Wii era but ultimately was too hardcore an idea for casual gamers who likely didn't have the high speed internet needed for Xbone to have been successful

The Series S doesn't do used games and the most played games these days are pretty much online only as they are multiplayer. He was ahead of his time. He didn't see the Smart TV uprising coming though.

I give him props for being part of the documentary considering he has kind of become the prime example of how not to run a video game business. Funnily enough the always online requirement kind of happened for both Xbox and Playstation just not on a system level but on a software level. His main fault in my eyes though was how much he hurt 1st party development for Xbox. The Coalition and 343 were pretty much carrying the brand for a while there. Sure they had some 3rd party deals here and there but none really worked out too well with Scalebound being a prime example.

I find this quote interesting:
I wish that I would have had an opportunity to stay, to execute on the vision and the capabilities that the team had created, but I ended up in the summertime announcing that I was going to be leaving.

For a bit, I think many of us might had felt he decided to jump the sinking ship before he was blamed for it sinking. I think, without actually saying it, he stated here that he had no choice, he was forced to resign.

Crazy how had he staid to "fully realize his vision" there would be no XBox today at all.

@Korgon Scalebound is a whole other thing, since there been plenty of reports/rumors that Platinum was taking Microsoft's money and sinking it into other projects.

But yes, the way Rare and Lionhead were basically shoehorned into making Kinect shovelware, letting go of Bungie... can you imagine had Bungie simply been allowed to create Destiny under XBox? As an XBox exclusive?

Even with all the bad rep that Xbox One had it still managed to sell more than 50 million units which is really good.

I feel that with the exception of Kinect, Phil Spencer is infact making Don Mattrick's XB1 vision real with Series X|S. Halo's getting a TV series next year, you have to connect to the internet to play games on Series X|S for the first time, physical versions of games can't be played at all without the day 1 patch, the existence of xCloud, etc.

Though it is interesting to think what gaming would be like without Xbox, it's very likely that if they let Don Mattrick continue his vision back in 2013 that Xbox would've been dead in 2014.

glad he has gone, i fully expect xbox would of died if that idiot was still in charge.

@oconnoclast such a good point. I feel like a lot of people that consider themselves gamers or are active in gaming communities, forums, sites, etc. latch onto the "Playstation has the better games and more exclusives, that's why they have the larger install base" narrative, but that isn't the mentality behind the vast majority of consumers (who don't buy/play more than 5 games per year). The Spider-Man stat is a good example and it applies to lots of other console exclusives (Breath of the Wild, Metroid Dread, Psychonauts 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, Last of Us, etc).

There are some exclusives that manage mass-market appeal, like Mario Kart (and maybe Halo will redeem itself over the next year!) that have a 50%+ install/attach rate, but it's extremely uncommon.

I wasn't really into xbox when this guy was at the helm, so what did this guy do that was that bad? Is he worse than Jim? Surely not 😂

This clown nearly put xbox in its grave, surprised he ever got hired again. I feel like with Ballmer at the top this was overall the dark age of Microsoft, took me the entire generation to gain any sort of trust in the Xbox brand again.

@Medic_Alert I've been on PS for the entirety of last gen for the reasons you gave, but game pass on PC and Xcloud streaming has got me back using xbox services again, so it's working.

"I wish I'd had an opportunity to stay..."

We don't.

He just absolutely botched the Xbox One launch and destroyed a generation of hard work where they had made the Xbox brand the brand in gaming. All in the bin and still trying to recover even now.

Thank God for Phil, he steered the ship back on course very quickly, but it just takes a long time to get that mindshare back, years in and it still hasn't been achieved.

Xbox is still digging itself out of a hole from that time. They had so much momentum and squandered it. Phil was the better choice.

@oconnoclast I highly doubt Sony decided to throw away $100 per console at the last minute. Xbox didnt even have to cost that much, had the kinect been a separate device. At the end of the day Sony also sold a camera kit, that also had its own falvor of motion detection technology, and once you counted that the full package was the same price as the XBox One. But it was optional.

As for "always online", there are only two types of games that require always online connections: multiplayer games [only during multiplayer modes] or free2play games that want to make sure you are not cheating. Anything else is an exception.

Even on PC, Steam itself does not require anyone connect to the internet every single day to play their digital game library. Xbox One's policy of requiring connecting to the internet every single day was simply inexcusable. Requiring day one patches is one thing, users can, at least, take their device somewhere to get that update, but players can't be expected to be moving their device somewhere with internet connectivity every single day.

@UltimateOtaku91 Is he worse than Jim?

Yes, yes, he was. And to be fair to Jim, he is just an extremely unlikable individual, but he is not killing PlayStation. He is nickel and diming the players with their upgrade policies, but that's just one minor thing among all the power moves PlayStation is doing under his leadership.

Honestly, his abandonment of the Japanese market and their upgrade policy are the only two things I can think he is doing that are, IMO, harmful for PlayStation long term.

Xbox One launch lost a lot of loyal fans. I was with Xbox since day one of the UK launch and preordered a 360 which I played to death. The One was so limp I abandoned Xbox for the whole generation and have only just come back.

Bruh, you literally said (verbatim), "if you don't have internet, or don't want to have an online device, then just stick with 360." Telling the market not to buy your product? Yikes

I do wonder if this is another classic example of a minority of fans thinking they speak for everyone. Microsoft will have done their market research to see what people actually used the Xbox 360 for and it may have been that 50% of that was watching video content.

By 2012 I was watching ALL my TV in the UK via the Xbox 360 Sky TV app supported by DVD, Netflix and Amazon. I used the Kinect voice commands all the time: "Xbox, Pause" was a lot faster than fishing the remote out when I needed to make a cup of tea.

I was sold on the Xbox One was soon as I watched the original presentation but it took a few years until I could afford it. By then Microsoft had torn out all the cool features like Skype and Snap, killed Kinect with slooooow server-side Cortana interactions and burned their 1st party studios to the ground.

It was actually backwards compatibility that sold me as I looked at losing all my PS3 games or keeping my 360 ones.

Whilst the announcement was a disaster, and Mattrick really needed to go… the Xbox One at least had good games at launch. I mean, Dead Rising 3, Ryse and Forza 5 amongst others👌… not bad!

@oconnoclast It's weird to me to discount that a lot of the most popular and most played games require an online connection because they can be considered multiplayer.

Maybe you play a ton of multiplayer games, but I only play one, FFXIV. Every other game I play, I just play offline. Even fighting games, I just play offline with friends in person.

Assassins Creed Vallhalla had some daily/weekly garbage added to it, but I never used it once (in great part because I didn't care, but also because Quick Resume broke the connection and I didn't care to restart the game to re-establish it.)

I have never played a Forza game, been meaning to give it a shot, but its very likely I'll just play any base content and once I'm done with that just move on to another game.

Weekly challenges... honestly... there are so few games I end up playing for over a week...

Live service games are definitively not the future. They are just one type of gaming. For the most part, 98% of the time, I prefer my games to be finite. Only reason I play FFXIV is because its basically an ever expanding story, and even that, I usually resubscribe once a year, get caught up on the story, and then quit.

Lets not forget it was precisely this "every game needs to have service features" that killed Deus Ex and The Avengers.

@K1LLEGAL That is something I have always given them credit even if the XBOne repulsed the hell out of me: the launch lineup of exclusive games for the machine was fantastic, as was year one as a whole.

On the other hand, I was playing exclusively third party multiplat games on my PS4... and Reshogun...

This is why I insist launch exclusives dont mean much. It is the steady supply of high quality exclusives that end up making or breaking the generation, and there was not a lot of exclusives to backup the platform past its first year, by then their messaging had slowed growth so badly that no one wanted to sign an exclusivity deal with them anymore, and Don Matrick had basically shuttered all but two of their own studios.

Just reading these quotes, the guy is till disconnected today. Wow!

@oconnoclast That list is the games that Sony noted have the most hours played. Yes, service games will have more hours sunk onto them, based on their service nature, they are designed to keep people coming back to the same game over and over. They are a zero sum type of game. They are competing for the same kind of people.

There are 112.6 million ps4s out there, and over 10 million PS5s. Only 47.2 million PSNPlus subscribers. Of the games you listed, only Fortnite can be played online without it, the rest (other than Destiny) have offline modes or are entirely offline.

Honestly, for someone that claim biases you are allowing biases to cloud your own judgement. I'm not saying online has no market, just that focusing on it will limit your reach significantly. Sony isn't investing money in single player narrative games out of charity, and the same goes for XBox today. Halo Infinite campaign is not there just as a favor to "a few players."

I was a ps4 guy until Phil launched gamepass. Now I bleed green

OMFG.

Not only did I not need to start my Monday with new words of wisdom from Donny, but I seriously can't believe this guy still seems to be insisting he was right but misunderstood! He's still spinning this thing! Eight years later and he still thinks X1 "all in one" embodies a "vision" he didn't properly communicate?!

What vision did he want to fully realize? The elimination of Xbox and the canonization of Playstation as the only home console? Or the vision of turning Xbox into a PS Vita TV?

I can't believe they put him in a documentary instead of going WiiU and pretending it never existed to begin with...

""We got pushback from consumers, from some journalists, questioning whether we'd made the right choice as a company. It was a valid criticism, but it was a very binary choice, and we chose to bet on online.""

I don't remember him presenting it that way at the time. What I remember was "It's 2013. It's always online. #dealwithit" and "We have a console for those customers, it's called Xbox 360"

There's toxic, and then there's Matrick....I can't believe he's still defending it! I'm sure there's an executive suite somewhere at Comcast with his name on it.

@UltimateOtaku91 I always refer to Jimbo as Jim 'Matrick' Ryan for a reason. Those two are peas in a pod, though they apply their malice against their own customers differently. Matrick technically is worse. At least Jim makes business sense while flipping off the return customers. Don managed to flip off the return customers, gut the internal studios entirely, AND make no business sense and lose a shedload of money, all at once. He's single handedly the reason PS4 a pseudo monopoly, grew so fast (Shu noted at launch that the huge demand they were seeing was mostly from 360 customers fleeing more than from PS3 customers upgrading). PS4, itself, wasn't anything really special, and the games that made it so famous didn't arrive for years later. But Don made the X1 look so bad at launch, it was a joke that any gamer had no reason to buy while he went chasing the Wii market after it sailed.

On top of that, you know the "Xbox has no games" and "Xbox has only Halo and Forza" meme that runs in PS circles? Yep, that's Donny's doing. He literally closed all of the internal studios during that time period and stated that his strategy was through timed exclusives of major AAA games, that exclusives weren't important, etc. Phil, at the time, ran Studios. Don literally closed all the departments out from under him, by the end he was running 2.5 studios. And that's why the whole X1 generation was devoid of meaningful games on XB, and why they've been making such a big deal about buying so many big studios wholesale. Don literally ran a scorched earth campaign from inside the company, he torched their entire internal development capability, until 343i was literally the only difference between Xbox and Stadia's development capabilities. Phil had half a generation to rebuild ALL of it from scratch in time for Series launch. Thus the big buyouts. Given a choice between buying big companies and IPs or spending 25 years rebuilding a studio system "organically"......not much of a choice

What they have more in common is their flippancy at their best customers. Jim with his "why would anybody play [old games]" gaffes, and Don with the "#dealwithit" quotes. Both really hate their core customers while chasing what they see as some big blue ocean.

Edit: And that's why people wringing their hands over "Microsoft devouring the industry" etc over in PS circles are seriously overthinking what's going on without a frame of reference. Tencent...yeah, they're doing exactly that. Microsoft isn't gobbling up the industry to create a monopoly. They're using their cash mountain in an emergency buying spree to rapidly try to rebuild their fortifications that Don so courteously burned to the ground on the way out.

His vision killed my love for Xbox and sent me back to PS, its only in recent years i've started to like Xbox again with this year with me getting a Series S. I still think that vision damaged Xbox beyond repair, i don't think they will ever reach the highs of 360 again sadly.

@oconnoclast Halo's campaign is Chapter 1 of a live service and can't even be obtained without a connection. I'm not even sure what you are getting at, and this feels pointless.

If you can't see the difference between having connectivity exclusively for the download, and having constant connectivity, then this exchange is indeed pointless. The nuclear submarine example Don Matrick was asked about was an extreme but not unrealistic scenario. I have family in the military. Deployments are a common thing. Taking your console with games pre-installed is a thing. Having constant-online connectivity is not a certain thing. And a huge part of the US still has completely unreliable internet connectivity.

@oconnoclast Very productive and adult exchange.

@WallyWest Looking at the pace of Series sales, I definitely think they can rebuild that. It takes one bad E3 to kill the brand, but it takes one good console to rebuild it. Series has the right optics, the right demand, and importantly has the momentum of big games with high critical acclaim along with Game Pass, that in 5 years nobody will remember the X1 existed, the brand cache will all be invested in what's happened with Series, which so far has been 100% positive aside from the Halo reveal/delay and the Gold price increase gaffe. If they keep it going (and Starfield is a big test) I think only we hardcore fans will remember TV, TV, Sports , TV, TV, IT"S GOT A DOG, TV, Sports.

Heck, if Sony could rebuild after the disaster that was PS3 (it was an even bigger disaster than the X1, don't let fanboys throw that whole "PS3 sold more units" thing at you, they sold those units mostly after the super slim came out, after PS4 launched, at sub-budget prices and people were mostly buying bargain priced and used games for them...PS3 lost big money and PS was in just as bad a position at the launch of PS4 as XB was in prior to the launch of the 1S, and Shu said that if PS4 hadn't become a big success they'd have closed. PS4 was their last ditch hope, and I'm sure the treatment of Vita is part of that. Similarly, XB was on the verge of closure before Phil convinced them to keep it, Reggie had said Nintendo considered that after WiiU, too, but with the success of 3DS, I find that unlikely...

Edit: Props to Kaz Hirai for the PS3. He still sunk money into that failure of a console, wisely knowing that he was buying the future of PS at the cost of buckets of money on a dead console. He could have taken the easy route and abandoned it, tried to buy customers back the next gen, but that would have ended up ruining the PS brand, in the same way Matrick later ruined the Xbox brand. Kaz made PS3 owners feel like they owned a thriving console rather than the flailing dead end it really was, all in debt spending. I think that went a long way to making PS4 appealing even with a really lackluster launch. Matrick later did the opposite, and it took Phil applying some of what Kaz did for PS3 to X1 to turn things around for XB as well.

@Tharsman The confusing upgrade policy is more of a short term damage than long term. Cross gen games is part of the transitional phase going into next gen, now current gen.

As I said in the other article about the entire story, I think Microsoft needed the XB1 experience and it taught them a very valuable lesson that they learned very quickly from.

Even within the first '6months' of the Generation, you could see that MS had learned a LOT from this but of course, they still had to live with that Millstone around their necks. The vast majority of the things they 'got wrong' with the XB1 reveal were completely 'gone' but that 'old' message was still there - and of course, the 'hardware' just wasn't as powerful.

From Phils appointment onwards, you can see what he brought to Xbox. Taking a team that had been 'crushed' and getting them focussed on the 'future' and what the brand used to represent - that being the 'best' hardware for games, game development and communities to grow - something they did with both the OG Xbox and 360 era consoles.

Of course that wasn't 'easy' with the weaker hardware, few studio's still under 'Microsoft' and only just starting the 'generation' but they started ID@Xbox which brought in devs and games, brought Backwards Compatibility which also increased the Library of games and acquired numerous Studio's with big 'Communities' (like Minecraft and now Zenimax which have big Bethesda and ID 'Doom/Quake' communities) and when they had a chance to address the 'Hardware', brought the XB1X, the most powerful hardware of that gen. This gen, they again have the most powerful Hardware.

Games are the Heart & Soul of the 'ecosystem' - not the Hardware - that just Facilitates those. Xbox learned that and with this Generation, its never been clearer that the 'hardware' is the Facilitator but not the most important. Yes they still want the most powerful Console - but its an option - as is the Series S - definitely not the most powerful, but most affordable option - meaning that 'many' more people can play and many don't have 4k TV's either. You don't even 'need' a Console to join in and play with friends, be part of the Community wherever you are and on devices you own inc PC and/or Mobile. Now you can even play next gen on last gen hardware.

They are 'breaking' down the 'barriers' to experience these games, be part of that community. Want to play 'Wolverine', well you need to buy a PS5, spend $70 on the game and maybe need PS+ to access all features (and that includes those 'card' things for Single Players - not just for online) so only those that have the money can play. Want to play Flight Sim? For a small 'monthly' charge, you can. Most people have a Mobile or a PC and streaming means you can jump in. Maybe can't afford (or find) a next gen Xbox, but could stream it on your old Xbox One.

The barriers really are down with Game Pass Ultimate - play on any compatible device anytime, anywhere. Don't need to find £60+, make room on your limited storage or wait to download/install, just jump straight in and become part of the community...

This has all come about (I believe) because of the XB1 and the lessons they learned from that. Yes a lot of it was perhaps too ahead of its time in some ways and the message wasn't well presented either, but that 'focus' on 'everything' else a Gaming device does should never take-away from the heart and soul of the device. MS learned that and today, Games are the Heart and Soul of 'Xbox'. Whether you play on a Console, on PC and/or Mobile, you are part of the Xbox community...

@shamirqushairi Yea, I don't even think upgrade headaches are something anyone will remember or be talking about in a couple of years.

What I think might cause some long term bitterness is the whole "you must pay for the upgrade of that game you got just last year", and I fully expect Sony to spend the next couple years re-releasing PS4 games with minor updates like Dual Sense support.

@NEStalgia I'm pretty sure both the PS3 & Xbox One were equally disastrous at their respective launches. However unlike the Xbox One, the PS3 was able to catch up with the competition & finally edging them out at the very end but it wasn't solely because of the PS3 Super Slim model, they simply had killer exclusives. It also didn't help that Microsoft was pushing hard on Kinect by the time Sony was rebranding the PS3.

The Xbox One never had a chance of catching up, not even coming close to the PS4. It was baffling to see Microsoft leaving their first/second party output at the state they're in throughout the 8th gen. Without those multi billion dollar acquisitions, Game Pass or no, they still would be struggling. And you can even witness the problems of the One seeping well into the Series consoles albeit slowly fading away.

Why couldn't he just stay but step down as head? I like what phil has done with xbox tho. Controller is rubbish, but everything else is ok.

Stay far far away..

Delusional.
The idea of the Xbox as an entertainment center was a good one that gets unjustly scapegoated.

Bad DRM, always-online, and the initial Kinect requirement are clearly what sunk the Xbone at launch.

It should be obvious that players prefer as much control as possible. It's a good thing this clown isn't at Microsoft anymore.

@shamirqushairi PS3 was a doorstop. I lovable doorstop, but from a business perspective, it was truly a doorstop. It "caught up" after the generation was over. It sold cheap hardware to an unprofitable customer base mostly in secondary markets, after game sales (the real profit maker) flatlined. The sales data on the exclusives surely wasn't enough to justify the generation. Fans love touting the whole "PS3 beat Xbox" thing but those are spurrious numbers taken out of context of who and where those units were sold to, the profitability per customer within that group, and ignores that PS3 was available in far more countries than 360, so "beating it eventually" largely came from "people in places where you couldn't buy xboxes bought PS3s." Look at the US, and even UK numbers, and PS3 did VERY badly by the end next to 360. Even the X1 did much better than PS3 in the primary markets. It was seriously bad. And burned a lot of developer bridges with how expensive and difficult it was to do anything with it.

Yeah, MS stopped pushing and Matrick was mid-demolition by the end of PS3 which certainly helped it, but there's no mistake that PS3 was a rope around Sony's neck through the end. The last minute console sales numbers didn't represent healthy or profitable games business at all.

But yeah, Matricks' damage at the start of X1 and the huge shift to PS4, there wasn't a hope MS could turn around the weaker console that nobody's friends played on to compete against the juggernaut of PS4. And they didn't really try to. They were mostly laying the groundwork for the next console, and dropped the Series S to at least slow the bleeding, and the X to showcase their commitment to the business and start some work like the BC and enhancements, etc. It's not so baffling the state of their games last gen. Matrick literally left them with no studios. Their "2nd parties" for Forza were all they had (now first party), Matrick lost them Bungie and building 343 from ashes didn't yield much for a long time, Coalition really did ok but flew under the radar..... They truly had nothing to work with. And even now we're only coming up on the start of the aquisitions paying off.

MS got a little lucky this time that Sony blundered their launch and had very little of note until 2022, themselves. It bought a lot of time to catch up.

@UltimateOtaku91 Don was bad at making Money;Jim will make Sony a ton money. For that matter Don alienated all “gamers”; Jim is only alienating “niche gamers”. Big difference; the core Sony buyers will be happy.

@mousieone To be fair, Don wanted to sell a machine that nobody wanted to buy. Jim wants to sell a vending machine linked to your credit card, that you kinda want, but it mostly does the same thing other machines do without being linked to your credit card.

TBH, I think anyone tied to the console exclusives are the definition of niche gamers. Mainstream gamers are playing Fortnite and FIFA. That's Jim's potential mistake down the road. He's alienating the niche that Sony's always had of Japanese game fans, and nickel and diming to an extreme the niche of the exclusives games fans while mostly chasing the big market big money GaaS players by being the "best place to play" those games.

No doubt, that's the big big money maker right now. But the long term catch to that is, that's one thing that doesn't need to be on a PS, and any competitor being it XB or Apple can storm right into that market and leave them without any niche of their own. The big money is in that mass GaaS platform host model today, but tomrrow when those tides turn, it's those loyal niches that float the brand forward, and he's waving them away.

Don's still far worse, but Jim only looks good while fortunes favor his model. Don was bad for the present. Jim looks good for the present but might be setting up long term problems for when the winds shift. MS is now following a sort of big tent approach. Instead of one cohesive identity it's more about welcoming all the niches. Except weeb bait...but they're working on that.

This man sent Rare to the Kinect mines and basically was the reason so many of the old blood that still remained jumped ship. So glad he’s gone.

Xbox One - the era where only Forza Halo and Gears were Xbox exclusive titles. Very disappointing console

His vision didn't deserve to succeed. I love the 360 but this put me off x1 instantly.

Its taken a lot of work to recover but that is down to the new management, not his.

Ahh the guy who drove me to PlayStation last Gen. Back now. If he had stayed I wouldn’t be. Glad he is gone.

@electrolite77 At least Iwata had the valid excuse of being Japanese. Japanese business culture pretty much insists upon admitting no fault, especially to outsiders (but fixing the fault, quiet.) And he had the valid excuse that they truly did blunder communications from the start (called it Wii and never showed a console, etc, etc...) Still to this day people think it was a Wii accessory. And WiiU was rumored to be outselling the X1 for a time (remember Phil defending WiiU and saying something about "I wish we had numbers like that"?)

Don doesn't have those excuses. He's not Japanese, he's just denser than a lead box filled with lead. And he'd have done a lot better if he hadn't communicated his "vision" quite so....clearly...."#dealwithit"

I'm so glad he didn't get a chance to ruin the future of the Xbox even more than he did. He destroyed the success of the Xbox so badly that they will never catch up again or match the popularity and sales of the PS. They were on equal footing during the PS360 era. And he has the balls to still say that he wishes he had the chance to carry out that delusional plan? Talk about being completely out of touch... The damage was substantial enough that there should be a documentary made called 'Donny Mattrick and the Fall of the Xbox'. That is his legacy. To think that he has no remorse, no regrets, and would continue to carry out a plan that a teenager could better formulate is beyond comprehension.

While I'm no fan of Mattrick's, there's no denying that he was ahead of his time, like it or not. We live in a future without physical media and we're always connected - it's really that simple. Steam is to blame for the former, progress for the latter. All of that said, the messaging behind the Xbox One was abysmal. I didn't even want one at all until I saw a Killer Instinct playable demo at a Microsoft Store in San Francisco. I knew then that I still wanted one.

Having said all of that, I really liked Skype, Kinect, OneGuide, etc. - I watched all of my TV through an Xbox One until they shut those features off. By then, most smart TV software had at least caught up a little bit.

That messaging though? Still makes me cringe. Who shows up to show some new games on a new games console and then doesn't bring games? Don Mattrick. Sap.

@electrolite77 There isn't much that went right with WiiU. It's not that it was a bad product, it really wasn't. And some things about it were better than Switch. It's a strange product of of bad timing and bad messaging. If you don't put hindsight in front of it and see what they thought they saw:

It brought dual screen gaming to home consoles for the first time. DS is the best selling console of all time, and 3DS was a very solid follow-up. What could go wrong?

It brought the idea of playing console games off the TV at the cost of running on a low powered console. Switch's runaway success shows people really did want that. It wasn't fully portable, no, but with Switch I highly suspect that most of the time spent playing handheld among customers is mostly spent at home and not out and about like Game Boy.

It was not much less powerful than Switch, 5 years earlier....so less relatively underpowered, but Switch sells like crazy.

I can see why they thought it would be successful. But then you cross it with reality:

The implementation of the tablet would have seemed revolutionary 2 years sooner. But in that time the iPad happened, and then the endless iPad clones happened, and suddenly the market was saturated with mid-priced tablets that were thin, sleek phone-like slates and the Game Pad ended up looking like it was 10 years out of date and made for infants. Not a too different situation from when MS released the 360 without HDMI and then HTDV happened right when they launched. Nintendo didn't have MS-like resources to just launch replacement hardware a year later, so instead they did it 5 years later and called it Switch

That messaging..... and the confusion about what market it targeted. "Show no console" blunder aside, it had the "U" rather than a 2. In Japanese the wordplay probably made more sense, but in the west it was a lead balloon. The Wii market wasn't the most in-touch market with gaming news, so confusion with the existing market followed. Plus, the WiiU targeted more traditional game customers, but added on the Wii branding, which Nintendo seemed to not know was a toxic brand to traditional game customers.

It was slow to boot, making it impossible to use as a pick-up and play device.

And finally they seemed unable to actually output software for the system at launch or at any decent pace, letting it sell mostly late ports of older games to a market that already had machines to play those games on and no actual incentive to buy them on their platform.

And yet, most of the same limitations of WiiU apply to Switch as well. It's weaker hardware by far. Nintendo's unable to produce a lot of software ad a decent pace on it. It's selling mostly late ports of old games most of its market already has better machines to play them on. Maybe because it's a handheld, but handhelds have never been a traditionally strong market in the West, and mostly when it did sell in the west sold to an alternative market than traditional games markets.

Practically, Switch is just a slightly more powerful WiiU, with an easier to develop for architecture, stripped of the dual screen feature, in a somewhat more attractive form factor. It's only major difference being it's a true portable handheld, but it's far from a pocketable handheld, and I've still yet to see anyone playing a Switch in public, while I'd see 3DS's and DS's in kids hands once in a blue moon. In many ways Switch should have failed for all the same reasons WiiU failed. Even the games have started to become much more like the Wii era in terms of what Nintendo puts out, and is attracting the same type of customer. True portability aside, the only true differences between the two are the communication around it with a focus on a specific market, a much more appealing physical form (in the post-iPad world, appearance is everything, even if it does the same thing)...and that's really it. In a practical sense, the Switch is literally just a WiiU Pro. Slightly more powerful, improved form factor, same games (LITERALLY the same games!!) and removes the tether to make it a handheld. Yet one sells itself out of stock for 5 years and counting and the other they literally couldn't give away. Even with the same games. For less money.

Some amount of the difference is it being a true handheld, but DS anomaly (the future of mobile gaming) aside, handhelds never lit up the sales charts like Switch. The rest comes down to communication and form factor. And the momentum of a good launch, which apparently is more important than we give it credit for. People just follow the herd.

In hindsight if they could have re-launched the WiiU in a sexier package and a slick marketing campaign, and made it easier to develop for, they probably could have made it a success. Then again...that is what they did.... Are we in year 5 of Switch, or year 9 of WiiU family?

In reality, hardware uniqueness aside, both Iwata and Matrick made the same mistake in their central strategy. Both of them tried selling underpowered traditional hardware in an oversized bulky form factor to the casual Wii market without understanding the casual Wii market didn't exist anymore, and without actually understanding who the Wii market even was. Iwata thought they were newly minted gamers ready for a big boy gaming experience. Matrick thought they were couch potato dunces looking for a holistic "entertainment center."

The difference is Matrick managed to make that mistake a year after Iwata already made the mistake, and attacked his own customers in the process. And Iwata figured out the mistake and scrambled to produce the Switch to fix it within a year or two. Matrick, 8 years later, still thinks the X1 was a great vision if only he had a chance to finish it! We have a console for him. It's called WiiU.

I LOLed at "breaking open the emergency Spencer"!

@electrolite77 ROFL! That's brutal, but it is indeed very true. Still, though, a lot of that comes out in the postmortem, and most of that stuff is stuff only the people that actually bought one ever really contemplated, and didn't really factor into people not buying them. HD games played handheld around the home with proper controls was still a totally unique new thing pre-Switch, and I have to say that's the feature I was most-excited about when it launched. One can laugh at the local-only streaming, but that's exactly what PS & XB Remote Play are all about, after all...) The inconsistency of the experience was a real problem, but that really was a buyers remorse problem more than an interest killer. The interest killers really came more from the dismal communicates that never sold it to begin with, the physical appearance of the controller in the new post-tablet world, and momentum early on was easily killed by Nintendo's lack of ability to produce software for their own hardware. Without launch software, they never generated a real mass appeal, which killed momentum quickly, and once momentum stalls out of the gate it's hard to get back. And before they ever actually got software out, PS4 was announced and revealed, which pretty much halted all momentum permanently as it was no an obviously obsolete machine. If it started selling out of the gate, that momentum might not have been so devastated by the early PS4 reveal (which was almost a full year before the machine released, almost certainly gunning for Nintendo more than MS. Both PS and XB were paranoid about giving Nintendo leeway after Wii/DS!) Nintendo less than a one year advantage in hype, from their E3, to PS4's announce it was about 8 months. But they did absolutely nothing in those 8 months but release hardware.

But Switch gives a very rare glimpse into what really made a product fail. Was it the concept of portable play on weak harware with a short battery life? No. Switch had all the same problems and thrived (and really, most portable play on a Switch isn't happening while sitting on park benches like a DS....) Was it the games that came out for it being undesirable? No, the same games sell mountains worth on Switch. The exact same games. Was it the price of the hardware? No, same as Switch. The price of the games? Same as Switch. Free online? Switch costs more. Graphics/performance? No Switch is around the same, slightly better. Switch remains a WiiU Pro with less features and untethered portability. But the narrative and appearance is entirely different. But, also, Switch launching without the shadow of a PS4 launching next to it, is significant. If WiiU hadn't launched at that same time, the story could have been at least somewhat different.

One thing I often think of that never gets said about the interaction between the PS4 reveal event and the WiiU tumbling is the role that Ubisoft played in that. We now know the PS4 and X1 were really pretty terrible consoles at launch. Both companies didn't want to take a loss and were worried about the effect of the Great Recession on console sales so they went cheap on the CPU, etc, infamously, now. But that PS4 reveal event made PS4 look like an amazing powerhouse. And the most memorable part of that that really became the icon of the PS4, to the point that it was the main focus on the back of the console's box, was Watch_Dogs. The amazing, mind-blowing, why-would-anybody-buy-a-WiiU-instead-of-this demonstration of Watch_Dogs at the end of the show made PS4 look mind-blowing, and made the WiiU look incredibly obsolete.

We now, in reality, know that demonstration was a 100% bullshot pre-rendered on PC, and the final game, even on PC looked nothing even close to that. What served as the exclamation point on Sony's amazing new console that was a major generational leap over WiiU was an imaginary game that never could have existed. That also loomed over the X1 shows....PS4 had that amazing W_D demo, and X1 has....900p? Aiden was the back of box on the PS4 because of it.

WiiU wasn't a powerhouse, but it wasn't so far behind, visually, the competition, especially X1, to have been dumped like a hot potato. But we all REMEMBER it being worse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX4HTUuCy3k

The left side is what we were told the PS4 would bring us. The right is what it actually brought us. That absolutely had an impact at least in hobbyist interpretation of WiiU, 2 months after launch. And X1, simultaneously.

The Xbox One Lauch was a bad mistep in introducing tech too early by Don, But to be fair he did preside over a highly successful period for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, as Well as Kinnect.

He was great for Business but bad for gaming, so naturally the invested gaming community was never going to really take to his Media first aproch very well. I would be curious to see if he would have come around to a gaming focus.

I actually really enjoyed all the features of My Xbox One when It came out.