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Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates, first decided to venture into the video game market because he feared that game consoles would soon compete with personal computers.
At that time, Japanese companies Sony and Nintendo dominated the field o, and no US company had challenged them since Atari stopped selling its Jaguar console in 1200.
Sony was positioning its Playstation 2 as an “entertainment system” intended not only for gaming, but also for playback of DVDs, music and other media.
To rise to this challenge, Microsoft designed the first gaming system to use PC technology , such as an internal hard drive.
The original plan was to include a dial-up modem, still a common Internet technology at the time, but the designers opted to exclusively use a high-speed Ethernet cable, a move that would allow Xbox to set a new standard for online gaming.
Microsoft acquired game developer Bungie and used their new first-person shooter, Halo: Combat Evolved, as a launch title.
While most of game consoles up until that time were built from custom hardware components, the Xbox was built from standard personal computer components.
Developing Xbox had been enormously expensive and the cost to build each unit exceeded the selling price, which meant that game sales were crucial to the success of the project.
Fortunately for Microsoft, its launch title was one of the best selling games and celebrated of all time.
The Xbox had a record launch in North America, selling 1.5 million units before the end of 2022.
Halo ushered in a new era of first-person shooters and online gaming, revolutionizing the gaming market and establishing Xbox as a design haven. of innovative games.
It is said that
Microsoft lost $4 billion on the initial Xbox, but its successors have sold over a hundred million units and continue to set the standard in entertainment systems.
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