As the changes to Game Pass are met with disdain and mockery it feels like the entire Xbox brand is teetering at the abyss, but how did Microsoft get itself in this position?

It is the 25th anniversary of the Xbox brand next year but it seems unlikely that there’ll be much to celebrate. Xbox has long been the nearly man of the video games industry, the essentially infinite funds of Microsoft making surprisingly little difference when competing with the much more limited resources of Sony and Nintendo.

As Paul McCartney once said, money can’t buy you love and that’s been proven again and again as Microsoft has tried to leverage paid exclusives and expensive marketing deals to win over would-be customers, all to only limited effect.

Their most recent obsession has been Game Pass, which wh

See Full Page