Xbox (console) in the context of Nvidia

The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft, being the successor to the original Xbox and the second console in the Xbox series. It was officially unveiled on MTV in a program titled MTV Presents Xbox: The Next Generation Revealed on May 12, 2005, with detailed launch and game information announced later that month at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). As a seventh-generation console, it primarily competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii.

The Xbox 360's online service, Xbox Live, was expanded from its previous iteration on the original Xbox and received regular updates during the console's lifetime. Available in free and subscription-based varieties, Xbox Live allows users to play games online; download games (through Xbox Live Arcade) and game demos; purchase and stream music, television programs, and films through the Xbox Music and Xbox Video portals; and access third-party content services through media streaming applications. In addition to online multimedia features, it allows users to stream media from local PCs. Several peripherals have been released, including wireless controllers, expanded hard drive storage, and the Kinect motion sensing camera. The release of these additional services and peripherals helped the Xbox brand grow from gaming-only to encompassing all multimedia, turning it into a hub for living-room computing entertainment.

Microsoft is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. Microsoft would also come to dominate the office suite market with Microsoft Office. The company has diversified in recent years into the video game industry with the Xbox, the Xbox 360, the Xbox One, and the Xbox Series X/S as well as into the consumer electronics and digital services market with Zune, MSN and the Windows Phone OS.

The company's initial public offering was held on March 14, 1986. The stock, which eventually closed at $27.75 a share, peaked at $29.25 a share shortly after the market opened for trading. After the offering, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $519.777 million. Microsoft has subsequently acquired over 225 companies, purchased stakes in 64 companies, and made 25 divestments. Of the companies that Microsoft has acquired, 107 were based in the United States. Microsoft has not released financial details for most of these mergers and acquisitions.

The Xbox One is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. Announced in May 2013, it is the successor to Xbox 360 and the third console in the Xbox series. It was first released in North America, parts of Europe, Australia, and South America in November 2013 and in Japan, China, and other European countries in September 2014. It is the first Xbox game console to be released in China, specifically in the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone. Microsoft marketed the device as an "all-in-one entertainment system", hence the name "Xbox One". An eighth-generation console, it mainly competed against Sony's PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's Wii U and later the Nintendo Switch.

Moving away from its predecessor's PowerPC-based architecture, the Xbox One marks a shift back to the x86 architecture used in the original Xbox; it features an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) from AMD built around the x86-64 instruction set. Xbox One's controller was redesigned over the Xbox 360's, with a redesigned body, D-pad, and triggers capable of delivering directional haptic feedback. The console places an increased emphasis on cloud computing, as well as social networking features and the ability to record and share video clips or screenshots from gameplay or livestream directly to streaming services such as Mixer and Twitch. Games can also be played off-console via a local area network on supported Windows 10 devices. The console can play Blu-ray Disc, and overlay live television programming from an existing set-top box or a digital tuner for digital terrestrial television with an enhanced program guide. The console optionally included a redesigned Kinect sensor, marketed as the "Kinect 2.0", providing improved motion tracking and voice recognition.

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (鴻海精密工業股份有限公司), doing business as Hon Hai Technology Group (鴻海科技集團) in Taiwan, Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集团) in China, and Foxconn (富士康) internationally, is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer established in 1974 with headquarters in Tucheng District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. In 2023, the company's annual revenue reached 6.16 trillion New Taiwan dollars (equivalent to US$198.533 billion in 2024) and was ranked 20th in the 2023 Fortune Global 500. It is the world's largest contract manufacturer of electronics. While headquartered in Taiwan, the company earns the majority of its revenue from assets in China and is one of the largest employers worldwide. Terry Gou is the company founder and former chairman.

Foxconn manufactures electronic products for major American, Canadian, Chinese, Finnish, and Japanese companies. Notable products manufactured by Foxconn include the BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Kindle, all Nintendo gaming systems since the GameCube, Nintendo DS models, Sega models, Nokia devices, Cisco products, Sony devices (including most PlayStation gaming consoles), Google Pixel devices, Xiaomi devices, every successor to Microsoft's Xbox console, and several CPU sockets, including the TR4 CPU socket on some motherboards. As of 2012, Foxconn factories manufactured an estimated 40% of all consumer electronics sold worldwide.

The Nintendo GameCube is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on September 14, 2001, in North America on November 18, 2001, in Europe on May 3, 2002, in Australia on May 17, 2002, in Brazil on August 23, 2002, and in South Korea on December 14, 2002. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64. As a sixth-generation console, the GameCube primarily competed with Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast, and Microsoft's Xbox.

Nintendo began developing the GameCube in 1998 after entering a partnership with ArtX to design a graphics processing unit. The console was formally announced under the codename "Dolphin" the following year and was released in 2001 as the GameCube. It is based on PowerPC. It is Nintendo's first console to use its own optical discs instead of ROM cartridges, supplemented by writable memory cards for saved games. Unlike its competitors, it is solely focused on gaming and does not play mass media like DVD or CD. The console supports limited online gaming for a few games via a GameCube broadband or modem adapter and can connect to a Game Boy Advance with a link cable for exclusive in-game features using the handheld as a second screen and controller. The GameCube supports e-Reader cards to unlock special features in a few games. The Game Boy Player add-on runs Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance cartridge games.

Wolfson Microelectronics plc was a microelectronics and fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland. It specialised in signal processing and mixed-signal chips for the consumer electronics market and had engineering and sales offices throughout Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the United States. In 2014, it was acquired by Cirrus Logic for £291 million.

Wolfson chips have found applications within the digital audio player market, such as in Apple's iPod product line, Microsoft's Zune, Cowon's line of mp3 and PMP players, and Sony's PSP. Wolfson chips have also found place in the Microsoft Xbox game console, Logitech Squeezebox Duet and the PalmOne Treo smartphone, and early versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch.

XIII is a first-person shooter video game, loosely based on the first five volumes of the 1984 Belgian graphic novel series of the same name. Developed and published by Ubisoft, it was released in November 2003 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, and GameCube; an Xbox version of the game, released at the same time, was developed by Southend Interactive, while an OS X version was developed by Zonic, published by Feral Interactive, and released in June 2004.

Designed with a comic book-style, cel-shaded presentation, the game incorporates single-player and multiplayer game modes. The game's main story focuses on a confused and amnesic man who searches for his identity after being found stranded on a beach. He slowly finds himself caught up in a conspiracy by a group who aims to overthrow the government. The protagonist assassinated the President of the United States, and is wanted by the FBI.

The Xbox network, formerly known and commonly referred to as Xbox Live, is an online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service created and operated by Microsoft Gaming for the Xbox brand. It was first made available to the original Xbox console on November 15, 2002. An updated version of the service, adding the Xbox Live Marketplace, became available with the Xbox 360 console launch in November 2005, and a further enhanced version was released in 2013 with the Xbox One. The service is used on the latest Xbox Series X and Series S and, in addition to a Microsoft account, is the account for Xbox ecosystem; accounts can store games and other content.

The service was extended in 2007 across the Windows platform, named Games for Windows – Live, now defunct, which made most aspects of the system available on Windows computers. The Microsoft Store and Xbox app are now used to cross over the Xbox ecosystem into PC gaming, in addition to handhelds and mobile phones as part of the Play Anywhere initiative. Microsoft's former mobile operating system, Windows Phone, included full Xbox Live functionality until it was discontinued. The service shut down for the original Xbox on April 15, 2010, and original Xbox Games are now only playable online through Insignia, an unofficial Xbox Live replacement service, or through local area network (LAN) tunneling applications.

Xbox Live Arcade (or XBLA) was a video game digital distribution service that was available for the Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles. It focused on smaller downloadable games from both major publishers and independent game developers. Titles on the service ranged from previously released arcade and console games to brand new games designed for the service, and were priced from a range of 5 to 20 US dollars. While originally requiring a disc to gain access to the service on the original Xbox, the Arcade was integrated into the Xbox 360 along with the rest of the Xbox Live Marketplace (later renamed Xbox Games Store) with the launch of the new console.

As of October 2016, there had been 709 Xbox Live Arcade titles released for the Xbox 360, with 27 being released for the original Xbox. The release of the Xbox One did not carry the Arcade branding over, and following the closure of the Xbox Live services for the original Xbox in 2010 and the Xbox Games Store in 2024, the Xbox Live Arcade branding is effectively defunct.

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. The name DirectX was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs (the X standing in for the particular API names) and soon became the name of the collection. When Microsoft later set out to develop a gaming console, the X was used as the basis of the name Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology. The X initial has been carried forward in the naming of APIs designed for the Xbox such as XInput and the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), while the DirectX pattern has been continued for Windows APIs such as Direct2D and DirectWrite.

Direct3D (the 3D graphics API within DirectX) is widely used in the development of video games for Microsoft Windows and the Xbox line of consoles. Direct3D is also used by other software applications for visualization and graphics tasks such as CAD/CAM engineering. As Direct3D is the most widely publicized component of DirectX, it is common to see the names "DirectX" and "Direct3D" used interchangeably.

Call of Duty 3 is a 2006 first-person shooter game developed by Treyarch and published by Activision. It is the third major installment in the Call of Duty series. It was released for PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii. It was a launch title for the PlayStation 3 and Wii in North America, Europe and Australia. It is also the only major installment to not release on PC.

The game received positive reviews on release and received several awards and nominations. Retrospective assessments have been more negative, with critics criticizing the game for lacking in innovation following its predecessors, although some noted the game featured elements that would be incorporated into later games in the series. Call of Duty 3 has placed low in lists ranking the series' games.

Bohemia Interactive a.s. is a Czech video game developer and publisher based in Prague. The company focuses on creating military simulation games such as Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis and the Arma series. It is also known for having worked on a game conversion of the DayZ mod created for Arma 2.

Founded by Marek Španěl in May 1999, the studio released its first game in 2001, a military shooter titled Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, which received critical acclaim and brought recognition for the studio. Following Operation Flashpoint was a series of downturns, such as porting the game to Xbox, which led to financial losses and the development of a sequel later abandoned by the publisher Codemasters. The studio fell into financial troubles until the United States Marine Corps employed the studio to create simulation games to train soldiers. A new division called Bohemia Interactive Simulations was created, and later spun off and became a standalone business entity. Following Codemasters' decision of not supporting the studio, Bohemia Interactive decided to develop a spiritual successor to Cold War Crisis titled Arma: Armed Assault. It was both a critical and financial success, spawning a number of sequels. Smaller projects such as Take On Helicopters were also released.

The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on October 26, in Europe on November 24, in Australia on November 30, and other regions thereafter. It is the successor to the original PlayStation as well as the second installment in the PlayStation brand of consoles. As a sixth-generation console, it competed with Nintendo's GameCube, Sega's Dreamcast, and Microsoft's Xbox.

Announced in 1999, Sony began developing the console after the immense success of its predecessor. In addition to serving as a game console, it features a built-in DVD drive and was priced lower than standalone DVD players of the time, enhancing its value. Full backward compatibility with original PlayStation games and accessories gave it access to a vast launch library, far surpassing those of its competitors. The console's hardware was also notable for its custom-built Emotion Engine processor, co-developed with Toshiba, which was promoted as being more powerful than most personal computers of the era.