By purchasing the subscription plan users could download games directly to the internal hard drive. On November 15 of 2002 Microsoft launched its first online gaming subscription service called Xbox Live. Although it was possible to copy game progress to other Xbox devices with the help of removable 8Mb SSD cards. So, there was no need to purchase additional external storage devices like on Amiga CD32, Sega CD and Saturn and other. By the time it was released it had the first in gaming consoles built-in hard disk drive used to store games, saves files and other necessary content. With Internet-based survey, which included 20 names variations the “Xbox” name was voted the most and it became the new name of the Microsoft Console. When it was first announced, the Company which purchased the rights to sell the console didn’t like the name. Initially, Xbox was named DirectXbox in order to emphasize the use of DirectX API in the console. Later the battle on the game consoles market continued with next generation of Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

It helped the Company to enter the gaming consoles market easily and even push the existing players to the side.

The Microsoft was a huge Company by that time and it was dominating various IT sectors. Anyhow, Microsoft have finished second in number of units sold leaving Sega and Nintendo behind, but still lost the first place to the PlayStation 2 by a large margin. Xbox was the first independent project of Microsoft's on the gaming consoles market after a joint project with SEGA Company to develop a version of the Windows CE operating system for the Dreamcast console. It appeared on the market in November of 2001 in order to compete with already settled giants such as PlayStation 2, Dreamcast by Sega and GameCube by Nintendo. Xbox is the first gaming console developed by Microsoft.

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