XBox is Likely Dead Already, But the Threat It Posed to Us All for Two Decades Isn't Over
In recent hours: Microsoft Gaming’s Future Looks Like It Just Killed the Xbox | Xbox Series X|S Losing Market Share: New Sales Data in 2025
In 2026 we'll try to chronicle the final death of XBox. We expect the final nails to be wedged into the XBox 'coffin' (a term used when critical defects resulted in alarming rates of returns, coinciding with house fires). XBox as a console won't survive and the consensus is shaping up in the media: XBox won't be a console anymore, there will be many XBox-related layoffs soon, and there's no route towards recovery (some of the very largest retailed have already given up on XBox).
"As mentioned before," an associate explains this week, "the Xbox was never about gaming and merely served as a test bed for DRM in commodity systems. Now that UEFI and TPM2 are mandatory to have installed, the Xbox is not needed any more. Vista 11 started making the lockdown mandatory. If Microsoft keeps getting bailouts, it will survive to make Vista 12 which will then probably require the firmware keys be tied to specific versions of Windows and exclude other versions like GNU/Linux and the *BSDs are currently excluded."
"It's another step in the ongoing war against general purpose computing," he added.
That Microsoft (and for that matter Apple as well, even GAFAM as a whole) is pursuing lock-down - which they euphemise as "security" or "appliances" whilst insisting that disenfranchising people would make things "simpler" - isn't some mere theory or aimless conjecture. There are documents showing exactly that, including Peter Gutmann's analysis of Vista DRM (about two decades ago).
Our associate remembers all this. They've not given up on that agenda. They've since then taken control not only of formats but also people's files (storage). They've dubbed this "cloud".
"Almost no news about the ICC having been cut off from its data and services by Microsoft a few months ago," he said. "Even though time has passed, the threat has not." Germany openly acknowledged that 'secure boot' was a national security risk, not a security feature.
The following video is old but still highly relevant: The Microsoft-Dilemma - Europe as a Software Colony (Full Documentary, 2018) [link 1; link 2]. █