Digital Foundry Investigates ‘Bricked’ Xbox One Consoles That Can’t Update

Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry team has come across an interesting development in recent months regarding old Xbox One consoles – and they’ve decided to investigate the matter for the most recent DF Weekly podcast episode.

To cut to the chase, the DF team has been spotting sporadic posts online in recent months about original Xbox One consoles not updating properly if on older firmware – which can effectively brick the consoles in question. This issue doesn’t appear to be very widespread, and when it does crop up, it only affect the original ‘VCR’ Xbox One systems.

What’s more, those systems must be on firmware from before 2018 to replicate this issue it seems – basically, if those old consoles have been updated since then, they should be absolutely fine. Here’s some of their findings so far:

“Based on our own testing from Xbox One consoles brought out of storage, systems operating on older firmware revisions error out when connected to Xbox Live.

Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. As far as we’re aware, the problem does not impact 2016’s Xbox One S hardware revision. We’re talking about the launch model, the set-top box edition. And it doesn’t apply to all consoles – if every single Xbox One ‘VCR’ out there couldn’t get online, I’m sure we would have heard about it sooner.

It seems to be Xbox One hardware that is running older firmware that has the biggest risk of not being able to update. Two of our consoles are running 2017 dashboards, the other a 2018 revision. None of them can update – not from the internet, nor from USB via the downloadable offline installer.

By extension, we can assume that any affected console that can’t update that is then factory reset (perhaps by a user looking to resell the console) cannot function at all, effectively ‘bricking’ the hardware until Microsoft can come up with a solution.”

Based on its own testing and reports from the community, these issues are rather sporadic, and it’s hard to know which consoles could be affected. Looking at early tests though, the DF team says it believes “a mandatory file in a firmware delivered in 2018 or later is required to successfully update the console”. The team has gone on to contact Microsoft about the issue, and it’s waiting to hear a response.

“We’ve informed Microsoft, we’re confident the problem will be fixed, but the situation raises awkward questions about the future prospects of console hardware reliant on an internet connection to fully function.”

What do you make of all this? Have you ever come across a similar issue when using an old Xbox One console? Please, tell us more and discuss down in the comments below.