The other major incentive for hacking the console Microsoft removed was for the first time on a modern mainstream home console to allow side loading of homebrew code/emulators etc. The console supported a developer mode that allowed side loading of third party applications, so folks could get emulators and other traditionally "banned" content on the console through an officially supported route.

There's a great presentation by Tony Chen on the Xbox One's security features:

> https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/chen/

Examples of the kinda software you can put on the Xbox One in developer mode:

> https://xboxdevstore.github.io/

There is this general vibe online that the newer generation xboxen are either bad, worse than playstation, or a straight up failure.

My series x, combined with gamepass, is by a very large margin the most at-home-entertainment bang I have gotten for my buck.

Before then I had what could be regarded as a "vintage" gaming PC: 1st gen i7 (nehalem?), a gts 450 and some amount of ram. An upgrade (read: full replacement) was desperately needed. This was in the middle of the crypto gpu boom, so a decent GPU alone would've wiped my budget. I settled for an xbox as it was cheaper than a ps5.

I've always seen myself as part of the pc master race, and thought consoles to be very limited. But man, it just worked, the games just worked, and gamepass made it all a total steal.

Even now, when our 3 month old baby is settled for the night, me and my wife's preferred entertainment is a session of bg3 over watching tv.

This is true, but it is also true that the Xbox One's security architecture and mitigations were ahead of its time. It would've taken a while to hack even with stronger incentives to hack it.

>The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform.

I get what this essentially means, but for those of us with a certain amount of love of language (or pedantry), it's fascinating to try and parse this literally because I don't quite think it works as intended.

Clearly the intended meaning is something like eclipsed in quality. And it may be overlapped in the sense that the same games are separately available on PC. But overlap isn't a relation of quality; quality is generally better or worse when it's comparative. So it's like a smushed together way simultaneously saying the selection of games on Xbone overlaps with what's available on PC and is also better quality on PC.

One thing PC does not have are the Xbox/Xbox 360 updated games. Microsoft did a great job of making the old games playable on Xbox One with better resolution, performance, etc. It would be nice to play the exclusive games of those consoles on PC through this.

Yeah, you couldn't be more wrong here. The exact same people who thoroughly destroyed the 360 badly wanted to attack this system - they were just outgunned.

There was a time when it would have been a hot target, but everything the original modded Xbox could do could be done easier elsewhere.

Pretty much, if you provide what people want elsewhere you will reduce the demand to crack the original system.

One of the reasons the Wii U was slow to be hacked was because Android TV boxes had come along plus things like Ouya/Nvidia shield, and it basically took away a lot of demand for a console turned into TV unit to use hacked software.

It still happened but not so quiclkly. Not like the original Wii which didnt really have much similar to it at the time.

This is not the reason, the reason is that the security is very strong. It's explained in the video.

No it doesn’t explain it. This is legitimately a difficult target. Did you watch the talk?

The people that MS hired to make and break this were top notch, and there is definitely incentive to maintain control over a content platform. This dude has been at this for /years/. I’ve been a fly on the wall on all sides to observe this.

There has been a lot of interest in underground / pirate communities to hack this, but that’s not the only reason why people hack things.

> Microsoft's best security measure was making something nobody cared enough about to hack in the first place

Maybe that's what they're trying to achieve with Windows as well.

The Xbox One has been emulated though (well not emulated, it's a compatibility layer like Wine). Before this hack, there was Collateral Damage. We were able to dump games with the exploit.

Minecraft: Xbox One Edition (the Legacy version) was of keen interest to our community as it would be playing LCE natively on a PC if you used a compatibility layer which never happened before.

So a few of my LCE cult friends contributed to WinDurango which was pretty much dead before they joined, and got Minecraft: Xbox One Edition to work.

Of course, you'd ask "why don't you just play Minecraft on PC normally?" Legacy Console Edition has so many minute differences and details that it's impossible to discuss all of them--things as big as the Minigames and as small as the mipmaps.

And then LCE source code from 2014 got leaked and that had a native PC port. Oh well.

Maybe cheaters want to cheat somewhere nobody else cheats. Idk if these games do online cross platform nowadays.

Definitely there's some truth to it

the main value is that it's way easier to make an emulator of a console than some point-in-time windows PC.

Also getting a dev account and loading up RetroArch/emulators in general is trivial. Best use of an Xbox one for sure. Well documented and exploited at this point.

Not the same as emulating its titles, but a lot of interest in the Xbone/series line (outside of actual console users) is the dev accounts. So I imagine a lot more effort went there first.