Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has acknowledged the effort of his staff who made sure that their online services were running well during the holiday season so that new PC and console owners were able to enjoy their games while on vacation. During the old days, a console and its games worked straight out of the box, as it wasn’t possible to update an NES game.
It can be perplexing to enjoy new consoles and games over the holiday, considering it’s even possible to buy one. The individuals who open their gifts on Christmas Eve have to go through the process of updating their consoles, and then downloading any day-one updates for their games.
This doesn’t take into account downloading games that are bought digitally, which can also be a tedious process. The gamers who have Xbox Game Pass can expect a few days of downloading games. As such, we suggest that parents open their gifts early and update the new consoles for their kids so that they will not be staring all the time at the loading screens on Christmas Day.
Thank you to all the people working behind the scenes on the platforms, services and games to ensure that all owners of new games, new consoles and new gaming PCs have a great experience today. No trending items or outages is gold for these teams, well done all.
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) December 25, 2020
The overwhelming number of new users on Christmas Day has caused various online services to crash in on themselves in the past years. This year has been really steady with no major outages reported on the news and social media.
Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has openly acknowledged all of his company’s employees who worked hard to guarantee that their servers were running on Christmas Day so that players would be able to enjoy their games without any disruptions. It is worth mentioning that Nintendo did post about an outage on Twitter, so it’s possible that Spencer was talking about this, as there were no similar problems with the servers of Microsoft.
This year saw a massive amount of internet usage, as people are forced to stay at home amidst the global pandemic. This resulted in internet speeds being decreased as well as data caps being suspended. Companies such as Sony and Microsoft imposed speed restrictions on their online services, which resulted in slower download speeds for games and updates. The holiday season was anticipated to cause all types of online problems, as new Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 owners might have caused servers collapsing down.
It’s probable that there were smaller problems and outages with people not being able to connect to servers, but they weren’t that widespread to cause major complaints on the internet. Any problems were likely fixed immediately, thanks to staff working on the holidays in order to make sure that everyone’s gaming time was uninterrupted.
