Should I Buy An Xbox in 2025?

Have you heard that almost everything is an Xbox? Your tablet, your phone. That old lady over the street who you don’t see as much as you used to. Now she’s an Xbox.

That’s the latest marketing slogan from the team at Microsoft Gaming. They’re putting a lot of time and money into telling you that you don’t need to buy their console to be part of the Xbox ecosystem. And so for this more than any other gaming device this year, the question of whether you should buy an Xbox in 2025 is a particularly interesting one.

Not only do you not need to buy one to play all those awesome Xbox games, including the pitch perfect Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but it almost seems like Xbox execs would much rather you didn’t.

It makes sense, as much as certain areas of the gaming community refuse to accept it. Selling a console costs Microsoft money. Getting you to subscribe to the cloud costs them practically nothing. Selling you a game on PlayStation costs them nothing. If your big rebellion against the Microsoft empire is to purchase their games on PC or Switch, well, the team probably aren’t using your hard earned cash to mop up their tears.

Subscribing to Game Pass for a month to play a game and then cancelling isn’t exactly showing ’em who’s boss either, champ.

Yes, it all makes sense from a business perspective. And I can nod along, accepting that it’s the way of things. Microsoft will become a gaming behemoth for the decisions they’re making right now.

And I can still try desperately to justify why someone would buy an Xbox in 2025. I’ve wracked my brains and I just don’t know.

The Good, The Bad and the Xbox

The console itself is great. The hardware and software are superb. Features like Quick Resume and automatic cloud saves for everybody automatically put it above the PS5. It’s smaller and more pleasant to look at, quiet as a whisper and its controllers are the standard for a reason. Haptics and gyro would be nice.

Their services are excellent. Game Pass is incomparable. Buying a game through the Xbox store more often than not gives me the PC version of the same title, and that’s something they’re looking to build up more in the future. Expect news in the coming months, maybe January.

It has been my console ecosystem of choice since the launch of the Xbox One X. The Series X is a hell of a device. The Series S is a wonderful 1080p entry into next-gen. Think of pairing the latter with cloud gaming if you can for an experience that punches well above the console’s weight.

But none of that is enough.

If you want the greatest graphics, buy a PC. Those are Xboxes now.

If you want a portable Xbox, get a Steam Deck and stream your games over the cloud, or a ROG Ally and play them natively.

Or if you want a console Xbox, why not buy a PlayStation? You’ll have to wait a few months (but probably not). Everything will arrive eventually. And you have plenty to play in the meantime, right?

Microsoft Gaming

I’m not going to cheer for exclusivity. I admire what Microsoft are doing.

It’s 2025. All the consoles are basically just closed wall PCs. There’s nothing the PS5 can do that the Xbox can’t work around and vice versa. There’s no reason Final Fantasy Rebirth can’t be an Xbox game, and there’s no reason Indiana Jones can’t be a PlayStation game. In an ideal world, I’d be earning Xbox achievements in Mario Kart just because I prefer Xbox’s OS over Nintendo’s.

It’s not an ideal world. Nintendo want me to buy their console to play Mario Kart, even though I could run it so much better on the devices I already have. PlayStation too. If I want to play Spider-Man 2 this Christmas, I have to do it on PlayStation. They’re all holding their software ransom, and it works. That’s the way it’s always been. It’s the way people like it.

Breaking out of that is a risky move. I’m sure it’ll pay off in for Microsoft in terms of revenue, and the next impossible industry-busting acquisition will be a doddle. Look out Valve.

But in the meantime it puts their old business in a precarious spot. Because we come back to the title of the article. Should you buy an Xbox in 2025? And if you’ve read this far, the answer is probably more ambiguous than you’d like.

To Buy Or Not To Buy

See, the Xbox is a great console. And given the state of things at the minute, you could quite easily buy an Xbox Series X that will last you another six to eight years. That’s a lot to get out of an entertainment product.

Seriously, many games are still getting released for the PS4 and the reality is that the leap to the next generation is going to be even smaller again. Game companies can’t afford to arbitrarily cut off the last generation just because any more. You’ll be buying Series X games in 2030 and beyond.

So in terms of value for money, the Xbox isn’t actually doing anything wrong. And yet you could just as easily buy a PlayStation 5 or a fancy new Switch 2 in 2025 and play exactly the same games, plus more. So for that reason, I err on the side of buying anything but an Xbox. The operating system won’t be as nice, the services won’t be as good, but you’ll have more games. Get a cheap gaming PC or a Steam Deck to have the best of all worlds.

You won’t be disappointed with a Series X, and the Series S is a great way into the next generation of games. But you will be missing out on PlayStation and Nintendo exclusives. How important that is in the end is up to you.