Indie indeed
And while Sony continues to be lauded as the true patron of modern indie gaming, Microsoft had invested in this growing bedrock of the games development community for years. Xbox Live Arcade added a whole new dimension to your gaming library with everything from Trials HD to Bastion finding success on Xbox 360 first before anywhere else.
Better yet, you could make your own game and submit it for sale. Sure, some of these titles were about as palatable as being Donald Trump's reflection, but the simple fact that you could have your very own game up on a global gaming network was unprecedented on consoles.
Here's another hot take for you: XBLA made digital downloads a viable addition to the console landscape. The likes of Steam have made non-physical media as commonplace as oxygen on the overclocked grasslands of PC, but they were a relatively new concept on closed-box machines in the mid '00s.
XBLA's Summer of Arcade drives (where a selection of up and coming titles were promoted and sold together at a discount) gave the likes of Trials HD and the like the platform to grow into the cult hits we know today.
Lest we forget there was a time where practically every advert for the latest big franchise entry had a swooshing flash of green at the end of it. The Xbox brand was everywhere - even the likes of Halo 3, Halo Reach and Gears of War placed a considerable Microsoft presence in the burgeoning eSports scene (and one that's paid dividends years later as eSports exploded onto the mainstream).
Even with the failure of Kinect (or Project Natal as it was for so many years), Xbox 360 still feels like a triumph. With that in mind, the Xbox One feels more of a misstep not so much for its flagging pace behind the PS4 but for how so many advantages were lost in the transition between the seventh and eighth generations.
