Are you thinking of giving away your old Xbox One and replacing it with a new Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X after you get one instead of a PlayStation 5? Or maybe you want to upgrade from your Xbox Series S to an Xbox Series X? Or maybe you want to jump ship and buy a PlayStation 5 after seeing yet another game miss the Xbox at launch after last year’s fiasco with Baldur’s Gate 3 (or you saw just how much effort Sony puts into marketing its first-party exclusives)?
Regardless of why you will let go of your Xbox, you’ll probably want to factory reset your console first to protect your valuable data and yourself from possible fraud. But before you reset your Xbox, you might want to wait until Microsoft issues a fix.
If you head over to the Microsoft Online support forum, you’ll find dozens of posts of Xbox owners asking for help because they can no longer play online after updating their console last August.
According to the replies on this Reddit thread, this is a more prevalent issue than expected, and Microsoft has only become aware of it. It’s not bricking Xbox consoles permanently (at least, not yet) but the inability to play online does affect how much you can enjoy your Xbox considering how popular online multiplayer games are these days.
Ironically, a factory reset of your Xbox is one of Microsoft’s go-to methods when issues arise, which means that their support team might have inadvertently caused many of the issues faced by many Xbox owners at the moment.
Microsoft’s gaming arm hasn’t had the best time lately. The Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X are seriously lagging behind its competition in terms of sales, relying on the competition’s price hikes for a boost and the number of noteworthy launch titles on Game Pass has slowed down considerably lately. To make matters worse, the list of video game developers who are becoming more vocal about the challenges they face in developing for the Xbox Series S is growing, with Funcom delaying Dune: Awakening consoles because of the extra time it’s taking to optimize the game on the economically priced console.
With Phil Spencer releasing tone-deaf statements regarding how many potentially exclusive titles he had let slip by, Mike Ybarra throwing shade at Xbox, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle headed to PlayStation, the only good thing happening with anything related to Xbox lately is Starfield.
Bethesda Game Studios’ controversial AAA space epic is slowly becoming more like the game that it was promised to be. After its most recent update, players are now coming back to enjoy the game that pretty much the entire internet vilified at this point last year. The upcoming expansion, Shattered Space, is also generating hype, potentially helping the Xbox exclusive title stage a comeback.
