10 Years Since Its Release, Let's Celebrate The Biggest Turnaround In Xbox History

Believe it or not, today marks exactly ten years since the release of the original Xbox One back on November 22nd, 2013! The console arrived for most regions on that date, followed by the likes of Japan and China in 2014.

Much has been said about the botched release of the Xbox One, and to call that time period a "disaster" isn't an exaggeration! Microsoft made some serious mistakes in the lead up to November 2013 including a mess of a reveal event in May, pricing the console much higher than the PS4, and announcing extremely controversial plans to make the Xbox One an always-online system with used game restrictions (that were eventually removed anyway).

All of this resulted in Xbox boss Don Mattrick leaving the company and being replaced by Phil Spencer in early 2014, and the Xbox One began to change significantly as a result. Over the coming years, there was much less of a focus on the entertainment aspects of the console - with Phil and his team choosing to hone in on games above all else - and we started to see some truly innovative features making their way onto the Xbox One including backwards compatibility, the arrival of Xbox Game Pass and much more.

Additionally, in 2016 and 2017, we got the Xbox One S and Xbox One X, both of which offered improvements over the original model - particularly in the form of the latter, which was marketed as the most powerful console in the world.

Flash forward to today, and we're looking at a console family that's now ten years old, and yet there are still countless Xbox fans enjoying what it has to offer. There was a time when Microsoft was apparently considering pulling the plug on Xbox altogether following that botched launch in 2013, but ten years later it's still going strong and we've got so much to thank it for. Without the struggles that the Xbox One faced at the start, we may never have been blessed with such brilliant creations as Xbox Game Pass that have transformed the industry altogether.

So, while it's easy to focus on the difficulties of the Xbox One's launch and how it ultimately put the ball in PlayStation's court for that era, it's impossible to deny that the console changed massively for the better over the next few years, with most of the generation serving as a unprecedented turnaround for Xbox that put the Series X and Series S in a tremendously strong position for their launches back in 2020. Things could have turned out very, very differently!

What are your favourite memories of the Xbox One? Tell us down in the comments section below.