Just as I predicted (in 2004), Xbox is failing.

I honestly think all of it can be blamed on bad leadership, specifically Phil Spencer. It was pretty obvious his management team was unaware of what was actually going on with the software side. Nothing makes that more evident than the Halo Infinite launch. They had an entire launch campaign planned for their new console with a Halo launch game and a huge media and third party product push, but no one knew how undercooked the game was until that infamous trailer was released and they delayed the game by a year. If you apply that lens to all the rest of their terrible software launches, it all starts to makes sense. Someone got wise in the Microsoft proper management and they started pulling the plug.

Also, there is a memory shortage, which has caused the price of the Xbox consoles to skyrocket, but Sony hasn't raised the price of the PS5 models. Clearly, the later was managing surplus parts and inventory, and the former was producing on demand and got caught with their pants down.

 

There was never any need for the Xbox.

PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo all offer unique experiences. The Xbox was always just a copycat ecosystem. I’m actually amazed it lasted as long as it did.

The huge success of Valve/Steam shows Microsoft should have put its full weight behind PC gaming rather than treating it like some unwanted redheaded stepchild.

 

The video points out that all consoles are failing. Xbox is just the worst. Computer part manufactures are indicating that they want to get out of the low profit consumer market and go full in on the AI data center bubble, which means we can look forward to a future of gaming and computing subscriptions rather than owning our own hardware.

 

I’ll add that kids these days have no interest in any of these systems or their games. They all play Roblox. My son never uses his Nintendo Switch and doesn't play anything in Steam. He didn't want a PlayStation 5 when we offered to buy him one at Costco. His friends are the same way. One of them has every console and never uses them because all he plays is Roblox. Roblox is already running remotely off of servers. The games as a service thing has already happened with the youth. We are old and living in the past.

 

I bought 3 2TB NVME drives during the Black Friday sales at Best Buy for about $130 each. Now it's two months later and I just check the price on one of them and it's $500.

 

My kids spend about 50% of their time watching other people plays Roblox on youtube, and about 50% of the time playing Roblox or other games.

 

The 64GB of Corsair DDR5 I bought in March of 2025 for $185 is now $1000.

I haven't seen a memory situation this bad since the Pentium 3/4 RAMBUS catastrophe in the late 90s and early 2000s.

 

Prebuilt PCs are a better deal currently, probably because the parts were bought wholesale and constructed before the memory crisis really hit. It's quite a mess.

 

I bought two 16GB laptops on Black Friday just in case I needed them and laptops get a lot more expensive. I'm thinking the memory is now worth more than I paid for the whole laptop, but the laptop is still cheap as heck. I also helped my mom buy another iMac a few weeks ago, but the prices seemed pretty normal. A 16GB Mac mini is still $500 which seems like a great deal.

I'm pretty sure I saw an article today saying Western Digital sold out of Hard Drives for all of 2026. Hard Drives. The spinning disk things we were tossing in the trash.

 

I have seen reports that Apple and Sony had a stockpile of memory, and they haven't needed to adjust pricing of their products. Microsoft was building on demand, which is why the cost of a Series X went up so much.